Premarks {08.06.12}

I'm back from a week in Mississippi building houses.  It is an interesting experience working daily in plus 100 degree heat.  It's also interesting how the marvels of modern technology make it so you can run a portable office while shingling a roof in Clarksdale.  More on that and some other investment thoughts later.  In the meantime market are basically flat with where they closed a week ago last Friday.  Of course stocks declined four of those days.  Shares rallied on Friday on the jobs report number and with the belief that both here and abroad governments will stimulate more if things don't begin to improve somewhat.  

Futures are higher this AM.  Looks like we will add to what we gained last week at least on the open.  Shares are now overbought in most of the time frames we measure so we will want to be a little careful in here in terms of new money purchases.  

Speaking of technology, last night NASA struck gold when they landed the Curiosity rover on Mars.  The best analogy to what they had to do would be for me to shoot an egg from a cannon to a spot 20 miles away, have the egg land pretty close to the bulls eye and have it not break.  How they did that feat of engineering skill is best explained here.  I watched the landing live last night on my iPad. Basically it was an announcer at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory's mission control commentating on the actual event.  One investment factoid to be gleamed by this is I noticed as they panned over the rows of engineers at their work stations everybody was using an Apple iMac.  Not another computer in sight.