Is this the bottom?

Gold hit a low of 1180, quite a bit off from the bottom I called a few weeks ago, when gold was in the 1300’s. This bottoming process has taken 21 months. There could be more to go.

Despite all the indicators of bottoming, I never got “the” bottom I expected.  That’s because you can’t expect them. They come when you least expect it. By exercising patience, and recognizing that bottoms mean opportunity is all you can do.

By realizing that bottoms are never really predicted, but ridden out with an active level of patience and understanding. Gratitude is the reward.

 

 

It ain’t over till it’s over

Investing means you will go through downturns. In my last post, I called a bottom for gold, and it appears that a new lower is going to be made. At least it’s what I expect.

With all the tools in the world, they will break from time to time, so you have to trust that the fundamentals will save you when this is so.

This means the pain has be experienced. That’s where the money is made.

GS BS

Goldman Sachs is sneaky.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-04-14/gold-bulls-endure-bear-market-as-goldman-says-sell-commodities.html

Goldman Sachs says sell commodiites so they can get in. What happened on 4/12/2013 is a move that large players make so that they can fill in their orders. Why else is GLD making a huge buying on weakness post?

G.S.B.S! A strong contrarian move is the cure.

Meanwhile gold is up $10 as I write.

Another low…this has to be it.

In one of my last posts, I mention a bottom. Wrong. Yet another setup for big money to come in came on 4/12. Gold dropped about $90 over the day to $1477. $1433 is the 200 day moving average. Days like this don’t come often. Here’s a chance to get some funds in.

This doesn’t mean it’s the bottom bottom, but certainly big money came in to buy up the stops. Big money sees value here. Expect margin calls to go out on Monday and more selling should proceed. Regardless, this was a good buying opportunity. I did take advantage of what I could here.

Buying on weakness. GLD leads on 4/12. Alot of stops were broken.

 

The bottom is in

I pondered if the bottom is in for the miners last week after another waterfall. It’s been quite a trek down, which included another major leg down and numerous fakeouts. I couldn’t get a clear read on this one otherwise I would have stopped out.

As I write this post, the bottom came last week. There I said it. With so many people now wanting to go back into the general stock market when it’s not the time to do so, tell me people are hanging the towel on miners.

When I’m going to doubt myself, I can always reflect back on this post and this time. It’s never different. This is how bubbles happen.

Hang tight.

Yoga teachers

Southern california is crazy about yoga. Crazy about funny yoga rituals. Funny immersed in it’s constantly happy and never dark ways. Namaste this, namaste that.

Yoga teachers too are familiar with dark ways. Some show it freely and naturally. On some, I can’t can barely sense it. It may be something that gets cultivated over time.

Seeing dark sides shows what it takes to practice value. It took one year worth of classes. When it shows, cherish it. Recognizing value from the underrated requires patience. With patience brings gratitude.

For that, namaste.

XSS prevention worksheet

As severe a fully exploitable sqli vulnerability is, the exploitable XSS vulnerability is equally as tricky. At least you know that defensive tactics are easier for sqli.

For XSS, it’s way more complex. Aside from more commonly known vectors like HTML and javascript,  consider additional vectors from CSS and Json. This requires coders to take extra care when handling untrusted input data. Thankfully, frameworks offer quick ways to parse and encode functions, but still the vigilance must be there.

https://www.owasp.org/index.php/XSS_(Cross_Site_Scripting)_Prevention_Cheat_Sheet#XSS_Prevention_Rules_Summary

OWASP Top Ten Defenses for Secure Coding

An excellent presentation by Jim Manico overviews tactics for secure coding for major web application vulnerabilities. He’s a master at his craft and I picked up new interesting insights from a countermeasure perspective, especially on XSS.

Click to access AppSecEU2012_Top_Ten_Defenses.pdf

python – experimenting

If you want to learn to program and want to start somewhere, python is pretty solid. It has good readability with straightforward syntax. It has packages that you can use to make life easier, but doesn’t have the depth ruby has (not always a bad thing). While I’m not a novice programmer, I found it tasting a bit like ruby and php. Heavier on the ruby.

As always, googling for knowledge is easy. It’s on you to do the rest.

https://developers.google.com/edu/python/

I think Google has lots and lots of python gurus. It’s a pretty good way to get familiar with the language. Reaching competency will take the work. At least google gives decent exercises.

 

Metadata

Metadata in digital forensics refers to information that describes data structures within a disk. I guess (guess, given the limited experience I’ve had with forensics so far) you could attribute this to header information on a packet.

Pretty amazing information

http://www.forensicswiki.org/wiki/Metadata#File_types_that_support_metadata_and_extraction_tools