Today I want to try something a little bit different.  I made you a cool present!

We’ll get to it in just a moment.  First we need to do a quick update.

I spent most of this week adding enhancements to Alpine Advisor Pro.  This is now our third issue and I’m very happy with how it’s progressing.  I think it’s a valuable service and I think that it will continue to get more valuable.  Plus, it’s tremendous fun for me to work on and I hope it shows in the product.  This month’s edition is 29 pages and 9,000 words.

Click here if you want to download February’s Lite edition.  I made some aesthetic changes and assembled a more comprehensive report that features content from the weekly newsletter as well.  One of the things that I’m noticing as this list quickly approaches 200 subscribers is that a large number of these folks do not follow the Cognitive Concord newsletter.

My goal is to make Alpine Advisor Lite a standalone monthly product, so I’ve included a digest of some of the month’s blog highlights in the monthly report.  If you’re an infrequent reader here at Cognitive Concord and don’t feel the need to consume every last detail, go ahead and sign up for Alpine Advisor Lite right now.  We’ll send you all the juicy bits once a month in addition to the recap of our Dividend Income portfolio

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I finished watching House of Cards earlier this week on Netflix.  It was fantastic.  Go watch it.  Kevin Spacey owns the show and he will be nominated for an Emmy this September.  Mark it down on your ballots.

There’s a really powerful scene about halfway in (don’t worry, it won’t spoil anything) where one of the characters is at an Alcoholic’s Anonymous meeting.

The speech he shares really connected with me:

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If you’re hungry for more about whether the market is making a cyclical top, I wrote an article on Seeking Alpha last week exploring the topic in more detail.  Long story short, the market was really overbought near the beginning of February but it’s less so today.

However, one caution flag has been a rolling over of emerging markets to begin the year.  Emerging markets are frequently a leading indicator for the larger, domestic markets.  They simply haven’t participated here in 2013.

Let’s go straight to some charts.

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I used to have this recurring dream.

I’d be standing on top of a cliff.  Or sometimes I would be running and would suddenly find myself atop a high bluff.  It didn’t matter what I was running from or why I was running in the first place.  Bears, pirates, a tornado.  Inconsequential.  What did matter was that I had to jump and I had to jump now.

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