John Chambers, Cisco’s CEO, gave his usual the-future’s-so-bright-I-gotta-wear-shades conference call last night and Cisco stock was up 15%. Even though all they did was their usual beat-by-a-penny. The programs took over and jammed the market up further on the back of the celebration and then it just sagged. Not a great performance, the Nasdaq was essentially unchanged after being up over 2%. However, the semiconductor shorts/puts were not helped by this whole process. I can wait.

Energy prices are high, what with the Middle East and the Alaska pipeline shutdown and I couldn’t resist lightening up a bit, so I sold my PWE. Also I bought some BKX puts this morning, allocated to Real Estate, because the bursting housing bubble is going to damage the banking sector.