I use Quicken to keep track of my finances. I have Quicken 2001. Intuit (the vendor of Quicken) today updated my copy of Quicken when I updated my security prices online so that as of April it will no longer support any online services. If I wanted to continue using any online services, then I had to buy Quicken 2005.

First of all they withdrew function that they had sold me. I can understand withdrawing support from an old product (I’ve done it myself) and even for Quicken to withdraw their online price updating service. I have no problem with that, basically, although I think three and a half years is pretty short. I do have a big problem of disabling the functionality in the program so that I can no longer download from banks, etc. who choose to continue to support me. In my opinion, this is extortion. Obviously there’s not much I can do about it, although I think some enterprising lawyer might find grounds for a lawsuit. What I can do, though, is commit that Intuit will never get a penny from me using these tactics. They have lost me as a customer, permanently. And as a recommender. If they had said, online services and support are $15/year (which is what it amounts to) then I probably would have been OK with that. But these deceptive tactics are too much for me.

I have purchased a product called Moneydance to replace Quicken. It is not nearly as pretty as Quicken, but it does have the huge benefit of an open API and the ability to add functions using Python (a popular scripting language). It also has multi-currency support, which Quicken 2001 does not. It downloads quotes from Yahoo!, which is also a benefit because I can now easily download quotes for various obscure Canadian securities that I own, but which I could not get through Quicken. So far (1 day) it has been fine. I will be running in parallel for the time being with a subset of accounts. Conversion is by exporting QIF files from Quicken and then inporting them into Moneydance.

Hopefully folks will start to contribute extensions. If I find the time, I’m thinking about doing one to calculate portfolio deltas and other greeks.

Lots of folks betting on a positive outcome for Sunday’s election in Iraq - probably on the theory that no matter what actually happens, at least initially it will be reported as a success in the US press and spun positively by the administration. Then the truth will dribble out through the foreign press. This is completely in accordance with the usual pattern of these things, as summed up in the headline traditional market adage.

“Self-indulgent” US consumers are the “weakest-link” in a global economy that could come off the rails at any moment, according to Stephen Roach, chief economist at Morgan Stanley Fxstreet.com

I must say I see around me over-the-top spending and complete disregard for saving or prudence, in fact anything other than immediate gratification. It certainly brings out my Puritan streak. I know the economic identity, that savings = investment and so we’re not getting any investment except to the extent that we can import savings. (We are importing more than 80% of the world’s savings, through the trade deficit, but we’re turning them right into consumption). Yet it doesn’t seem to matter. The money-printing continues and the spending continues. I was about to say economy rather than spending, but it doesn’t seem fair to call it an economy when it is just a continuous debt pump, not a balance of consumption and production.

When is the piper going to want to be paid?

No, not George Orwell, Steve Jobs. Today is the 20th. anniversary of the launch of Macintosh. Check this page for a newly recovered and renovated video of the introduction.

Yeah, nothing to do with the markets. But it’s a nice reminder of old times.

The stock market is pretty oversold by some measures. Technical analysis, the art of prophesy using charts, therefore expects a rally to come anytime as early shorts are tempted to take profits and late shorts are forced to cover or face losses as the market turns. It seems that both bulls and bears want this rally. Bulls because it is the natural order of things and the market should resume its upward trajectory, and bears because they don’t want to be the late shorts, needing a rally to sell into strength. So far, the need for the rally has been so universal that it has failed to come. It probably will, but it will doubtless disappoint the expectant masses.

The unfortunate tendency of speculation is to transfer wealth from the majority to a minority.