John Lennon first met Yoko Ono in 1966 at an avant garde art gallery in London called Indica. There was an exhibition with a ladder that led to a painting, which was hung on the ceiling. It looked like a white canvas with a chain with a spyglass hanging on the end of it.
Lennon climbed the ladder, looked through the spyglass, and in tiny little letters it said, YES.
This was such a positive message that Lennon described his reaction as one of "relief".
Although this incident took place well over fourty years ago, I find myself thinking about the message of relief behind the art quite often. Every day when we turn on the news channel, it seems that the overwhelming number of news items are about, how many people are killed in terrorist attacks, car accidents, shootings and other destructive acts.
It seems that if there are not enough of these types of stories from the murkier side of human nature, the media looks to the economy, the level of unemployment, encroaching deflation, spiralling interest rates and how it will directly affect us all. Not only do they tell us about their worst fears, they continually remind us over and over every night, so the cycle of worry and anxiety feeds incessantly on itself.
Sensationalism often takes the place of balance reporting, and words such as alleged, reported, possible and so forth creep into the story line all too often when it is very obvious that the media is on weak ground and fishing around for something "meatier" than a more upbeat humane story or scientific discovery.
It seems to me that the combined impact of the global financial crisis on our personal lives, whether it be through the loss of a job, depleted savings, lower superannuation or the secondary impact on friends and relatives, the last thing we need is an over abundance of negatively slanted news in our lives.
Now I want to be very clear about what I mean here. I am not advocating that the media ignore the tragedies happening in the world, but more, a balance approach to news presentation. Instead of five out of six stories being negative, how about fifty fifty or better. In these difficult times we need to hear more about the positive side of life, society and the economy. Lets look to the future with a positive approach and not one of anxiety and despair. Facing reality in times of change is a challenge for all of us and we really do need the glass to be half full.
The bad times are over, if you really want them to be. .....
Cheers
However as we approached Thanksgiving, which was a four day holiday this year, the market makers began to crush down the IV, so as to artificially or prematurely adjust the theta out of the market to a point where prior to the Thanksgiving long weekend, the thetas values reflected the post holiday values. What this effectively means is that you cannot sell premium prior top the holiday break on say the Friday and expect to get the benefit of free theta without any market risk over the weekend because the markets are shut. This is because the market makers have adjusted the IV and theta values by the close of business on the Friday to reflect the values on market open on Monday. 
The same situation has happened again over Christmas and again as we go into the New Year. If you click on the RUT graph on the right to increase it's size, you will see that at the holiday period progressed the IV levels for the RUT continued to fall. Some of this decline was due to the progressive rising prices for the RUT but again, some of the decline was artificially manipulated by the market makers not wanting to give away free Theta over the holiday break while the market was closed..
