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	The End Of Oil, Buy DUG I have never been big on trading commodities. It seems like the price of them is intertwined with to many other various factors that I have yet to figure out. The one commodity that gets the most press and I hear about the most is the price of oil. As a regular watcher of CNBC it seems that they talk about the price of oil every 5 minutes. From what I have been hearing and from the way people are reacting it is my belief that the price of oil is topping out. The guys on FastMoney have even referred to the chart below as "going parabolic". Oil has had an unbelievable run this year doubling from $60 a barrel to a new high of roughly $135 last night. I am going to avoid the technical reasons all together and explain my three simple psychological reasons as to why we have had such a huge run up in oil. 1) Bush and his republican buddies are leaving the White House. I can't help but think about Bush's connections as a Texas oil man and all he is doing in the middle east and around the world with regards to oil. It is almost as if this is the last chance Bush and all his oil buddies have to reap the rewards of the high price of oil. 2) The Democrats are going to be pro alternative and renewable energy and from this point forward, oil will play a less important role in transportation. Demand is going to slow and supply/demand will no longer be an excuse for speculators to lean on. 3) This might be the last chance to rally oil for as long as we live. That's right. This might very well be the last run oil ever makes if we are able to convert the world to alternative energies. With this in mind, the only thing we can do at this point is try and call a top and get short oil. The most likely candidate for doing so is DUG, The ProShares UltraShort Oil & Gas Fund. This ETF shorts roughly 80 various oil and gas companies with half of the fund being made up of companies like ExxonMobil (XOM), Chevron (CVX), and ConocoPhillips (COP). The fund has seen explosive volume in recent days up roughly 400%. I am going to start building a position now, because once oil starts to drop, it is going to be a slippery slope. 22 May 2008 Disqus Comments »

	Introduce Yourself 21 May 2008 Disqus Comments »

	Fighting For Furminators Just when I thought people are abandoning eBaY for other online shopping sites I was proved wrong. My mom called me this morning and left this voicemail: "Greg, I need to get this special dog hair brush for Kelsey. It is called THE FURMINATOR and my friend said the best place to get it is on ebay. You are much better at that stuff than I am so can you do it for me?" So I hop onto ebay, search "furminator" and I was shocked. There were over 650 items (which is what I expected because eBaY is so over crowded) but almost ALL of them had bids. People were fighting for Furminators! It comes in 3 different sizes: small($23.99), medium($28.99) and large($33.99). Of course my mom said she needs the large one. Every single one is selling and some of them have over 15 bids before the auction is over. Inventing this product is one thing, but whoever is behind the viral marketing campaign is a genius. 20 May 2008 Disqus Comments »

	Track Advertising Success With Barcodes Looks like barcodes are finally going to become a consumer product thanks to ScanLife. I've heard for years that they are huge in Japan. There are a TON of ways this can be used to enhance and track marketing campaigns. What I didn't expect is that it would take the iPhone to finally bring them to us. 20 May 2008 Disqus Comments »

	Nissan Plugs In So yesterday (Sunday night... odd timing?) Nissan announced a huge investment of $115 million in NEC Corp. to start producing lithium ion batteries for their vehicles. I wonder what type of implications this has for Hybrid Technologies (HYBR.OB). I still havn't determined what (if any) patents HYBR has on lithium ion vehicles. "By 2012, Nissan plans to mass-market electric vehicles to consumers globally. It is also planning to make available on a wide scale zero-emission vehicles in Israel and Denmark in 2011." Related Posts: Investing In Hybrid Technologies 19 May 2008 Disqus Comments »

	Investing In Hybrid Technologies I am the first person to admit that investing in penny stocks is shady business. One of these days I will write a full explanation of why I do it anyways. My most recent penny stock investment is in Hybrid Technologies(HYBR.OB) Hybrid Tech. makes lithium ion powered vehicles. Basically what that means is that they have found a way to power cars with the same technology that powers our cell phones and laptops. They have a full line of cars most of which take between 6-10 hours to charge and can be charged up to 1,500 times before needing replaced batteries. If you charge your car every single night (which isn't necessary), thats still over 4 years of battery life. The hype around this company is huge and they have a very aggressive PR company fueling the fire. Recently Popular Mechanics Magazine Experts reported that Hybrid Technologies has a real chance at winning the Xprize. Four years ago the stock was trading at about $100! Shares has been acting pretty crazy lately and took a giant hit recently after the company payed a large cash dividend (shaddyyy). After getting knocked down to $2 it is making a comaback on strong volume. It will be interesting to see how much this stock can recover from the big fall. I bought in at $4.65 on Monday 5/12/08 and already find myself up 23%. I am going to hang on and see if this is the penny stock that makes me rich =) 16 May 2008 Disqus Comments »

	PriceLine Negotiator I was recently stunned to find out that PriceLine.com(PCLN) was a $5.3 billion company. I see the commercials every week and figured that since the economy was in bad shape, they were just trying to convince people to travel. But in reality, they are spending their advertising dollars to fuel the biggest bull run I have seen in a internet stock in some time. I had always compared PriceLine.com to a Interactive Corp.(IAC) style company. One of those sites that is owned by a parent company and just never really gets anywhere. Turns out, PCLN has been ramping up its international sales and buying a couple international travel sites to stay ahead of the US meltdown. Their recent positive earnings have sent this stock soaring into uncharted territory. While there is seriously no way you can get short a trend like this, how long can a web company in such a competitive space remain so bullish? I am going to keep it on the radar just to make sure I am there when it falls. The video below does an excellent job of analyzing PCLN's chart. 16 May 2008 Disqus Comments »

	About The New Disqus Commenting System I spent some time today installing and customizing the Disqus comment system you see below. I am super impressed with this company and thought I would "Disqus" how it works and some if its benefits. At it's core, Disqus is a commenting with advanced features such as voting and threaded commenting. Aside from being a simple commenting tool, Disqus adds various social aspects to your site allowing your community to better interact with one another. After creating an account, your profile travels with you to every website that uses the Disqus system (and the number of them is growing at a rapid rate). Your comments will display your avatar, link to your accounts on other social websites such as Twitter, Facebook etc. and most importantly, it displays the recent comments you made on other websites using Disqus. This makes Disqus a great tool for finding similar websites you might be interested based on where other people are commenting. Disqus also offers publishers a bunch of cool widgets they can add to their blog including: recent comments, popular threads & top commenters. On the back end, Disqus gives you a simple, beautiful interface for managing your comments and interacting with your website's community. Not only is the look of your comments fully customizale with css, but I was able to customize the threading so that whichever link you are viewing this post from, the comments stick together. I have always been a fan of CuteNews, but one problem has caused me endless headaches and thats the multiple URLs for every article. This post alone can be viewed at: http://www.brainbackup.net/rss-index.php?subaction=showfull&id=1210730609&archive=&start_from=&ucat=3& http://brainbackup.net/post/about-the-new-disqus-commenting-system.html and http://brainbackup.net/tech_webdesign/post/about-the-new-disqus-commenting-system.html As you can see, all of the comments still stick together no matter what url you use. I documented the Disqus/CuteNews integration over at SplitP if you are interested. Special thanks to Danial Ha for helping me get this up and running to perfection. With such a dedicated founder, and amazing product, I see a very bright future for the Discus system. 13 May 2008 Disqus Comments »

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