march expirations

The daily line is about to cross into the green. That would be five sessions in a row. The shorts seemed to resume covering at SFBC, Int'l. The stock has gone up every day this week, albiet on lower volume until today. The strength there is offset by weakness at WPCS. They are down around eight-fifty because they asked for an extension to file. They did say that before a special charge, they made $0.16 last quarter, and that their operations and cash flow are not affected. As soon as I can, I will be loading up more shares, since the risk is already priced into the stock.

There is a little strength in the tech side of the house, which is offset by a little weakness in energy. Hopefully NFX will come back today like it has all week. Selling early in the session, followed by buying all afternoon. I love expiration Friday!

Almost time for my first round of "Call of Duty" for the day. I felt a bit of frustration lately, trying to get online to play "Medal of Honor, Allied Assault." The only ways to play online are with a manual I.P. address of a server, or connecting through GameSpy. First off, the name isn't exactly a warm fuzzy going on my hard drive. And my anti-virus program detected it try to install two spyware programs, alaunch.cab, and Adware_Generic.CZ. Even so, I went ahead with the install.

I wrote to EA games requesting support on the issue. Why do I have to exit the program to go multiplayer. Why can't it be like MOH: Pacific Assault, where servers can be found within the game. I love EA's response: uninstall the progam. That must be the only thing on their customer service boilerplate, it's so obvious. It did lead me to the proper resolution, that was, to install the multiplayer patch.

After installing the patch, I fiddled with GameSpy for a bit, and learned how to use it. It has a central interface for all my multiplayer games. Exactly what I don't need. When I click the 'Medal of Honor' icon, it brings up a menu with games in progress all over the place: the Eastern Front, the Siegfried Line, deathmatch, and more. GameSpy keeps track of all the players, in a chat-like interface. All of the players playing all of the games on all of the servers came out to 59 total people, early this morning. The fact that GameSpy still won't actually launch the multiplayer because of yet another issue, is hence irrelevent. What a colossal waste of time.

Don't think a company like EA really cares, having left the 'Medal of Honor' franchise to wither on the vine. Evidently they have ceded the WWII shooter franchise to the 'Call of Duty' developers, who are former EA anyway. Every time EA is about to release another blockbuster video game, I take a look at the stock. Every time I come away feeling that the equity is a little overvalued; the trailing P/E is over sixty, and the price/sales is almost six. Quite a premium for a stock that isn't growing that fast anymore. Maybe I'll dig a little into Midway Games, (MWY) and try to figure out if they are going to re-join the living.

buon fortunados