Whippet's  Instablog

  You know, all this talk of "Letter Shaped" recoveries has begun to wear thin on me, and I'm sure you're all sick of it as well.  You have the Pollyanna "V shaped" clan.  And the Marc Faber, Nouriel Roubini "L shaped" party crashers.  The "U shaped" folks are disappearing rapidly due to the spring-summer recovery of the lion's share of losses.  And the "W shaped" folks are getting creamed right now setting their short orders too early.

Honestly, I can't pick a Latin letter to display my outlook here.  (Isn't that the problem with us ignorant, monolingusitic Americans?  We try to define everything in our cultural understanding?)  Since I need to become more European, as our fearless leader has proclaimed, and I know basic Attic greek and learned the Cyrillic alphabet years ago, I thought I would inject a few new "lettered recovery scenarios" into the mix:

The "и” Recovery:  Soviet-bloc denizens pronounce this letter as a long E.  You have a cratering, followed by a steady recovery, followed by another crater.  I really like this one, especially if it's in a slightly-leaning-to-the-left italic font.  There are great fundamental arguments for this character.  But it still contains the restrictive linear form of Latin characters.

The "ς" Recovery:  Now, this lower case Greek terminal sigma is starting to show some more curvature.  Turn it 90 degrees, to the left, and you have essentially a shallow U followed by a drop into the unknown.  We have potential here.

The "ξ" Recovery:  A Greek xi is tough to master; these always looked better in my Greek homework after a few beers.  Turned 90 degrees like the sigma above, it can capture more chart data than just about any other letter.  I prefer to look at it symbolically- it spins around with radical volatility until crapping out at the bottom with an ink blot.  Maybe I should send this one to Roubini...

C'mon- let's Embrace Globalism and bring a glass of water to this increasingly dry conversation.  I'm sure our Mandarin speaking friends can post some doozies...