The Long Road To Tenerife

Living in Spain affords you not only the pleasures of to the Mediterranean lifestyle, its delicious food, and enviable weather, but also offers you cheap and quick access to a vast number of popular holiday resorts. For instance Valencia is just a two hour ferry ride away from the island Ibiza, and if you’re partial to summer nights dancing to Euro trance surrounded by scantily clothed sun kissed women then you are in luck. Or so they say – everyone knows the Mole is completely impervious to such hedonistic pleasures.

Anyway, so when we planned our trip to Tenerife who would have suspected that a two hour flight would somehow turn into a mind numbing twelve hour affair. Well, actually I did – because as I mentioned the other day – I’m just that lucky.

First up we couldn’t really take a direct flight as Valencia for some reason connects directly to Paris, Vienna, Zürich and probably Butte, Montana, but certainly not to Tenerife, Spain. All the bridge flights that were available included a 5 hour plus wait in Madrid. Which sounded terrible but in retrospect it’s what we should have done. In our infinite wisdom we instead decided to take the AVE high speed train from VLC to Madrid. That actually cost us more than the damn flight ticket to Tenerife if you would believe it. And it was jam packed with a bunch of suits pecking away on their lappies, giving us dirty stares for complaining about the heating system which was cranking away at 90 degrees (Fahrenheit or Celsius – who knows, it was damn hot).

Once we finally got to Madrid it was like 5 degrees (again pick your scale) and we were freezing our asses off. Normally taking the Renfe also gives you a free ticket for one of the Cercanias that connect you to the Madrid airport. Except of course when the Mole and his Misses take it – nooo – on that day some technical issues puts them all out of commission. And so we had to take the taxi instead which put us down another 30 Euros, which wasn’t that big of a deal but it was annoying. Once at the airport we had still wait three hours to get on the plane.

Which was when the real fun started because Air Europa somehow managed to lose someone’s luggage and we wound up sitting on the tarmac for one hour with the doors open, once again freezing our butts off (remember 5 degrees below absolute zero). It didn’t help matters that the plane was filled to the hilt with pale sun deprived Northern Europeans (the Spanish lovingly call them guiris), half of whom were coughing and sneezing – mostly exactly in our direction (they should make a shirt about that). Two hours later we were finally approaching Tenerife and hit a bit of turbulence which seemed to affect some fat woman shoehorned into a tiny seat next to me who had been pigging out on junk food during the entire flight (yes, we are politically correct here at Evil Speculator). And I kid you not – she turned white like a sheet and started puking into a bag all the way through the landing procedure.

And the fun didn’t stop there. Once landed our luggage was of course the last to arrive which put us last in line at the car rental place. Once we got our vehicle the trunk didn’t open and I had to go all the way back and get a new one (car that is – not a new trunk). Of course it goes without saying that we got lost a dozen times on the way to the little mountain retreat that we had rented. Because believe it or not – it turns out that the GPS system doesn’t work very well in narrow mountain roads on tiny islands somewhere in the Atlantic near Africa.

And of course the Internet connection, which the rental agent had personally verified per my request, was in fact (drum rolls) non-existent. So the actual owners of the property, who turned out to be the sweetest people you’d ever meet, spent hours organizing some wireless router on their own time and dime which – and again I kid you not – is blinking away in the night strapped to the top of our roof below a plastic bag right now. I’ll take some pictures tomorrow and post them here for posterity.

So in summary – pretty much exactly what I expected before I left Valencia. And that is the reason why I hate to travel 😉

Alright, if you made it through all my bitching all the way to here then you have earned an update on what’s happening on the equities front. Not much that is – the current price action is nothing but a lackluster correction and if you’re long equities there’s no reason for concern – at least not yet. The hourly BBs however are compressing and we may see a surprise move here tomorrow or Friday. So keep an eye eye on the Zero for early signs of monkey business – in either direction that is.

Speaking of which, today’s signal range on the Zero Lite was tiny and looking at that price action I’m rather happy having spent it frolicking on an Mediterranean island instead. Those swings were nasty and clearly engineered to shake off some weak hands. For now there’s no reason to worry for the bulls – but (and there always is a but, isn’t there) they don’t want to test their luck for too long either. That 100-day SMA needs to be tested a little so that we can establish bullish context for later. But we don’t want to get stuck here either or we may just be drawn lower again.

Crikey! Reading that you’d never think that grabbed some cheap OTM puts just a few days ago, would you? Alright, it’s late over here and I really need to run. See you guys in a day or two. In the interim – hold the fort and don’t do anything stupid. Here’s how to surive Mole’s vacation: Every time you consider futzing with your campaign or taking an entry, just ask yourself: What would Mole do? 😉