Our resident Graphics Guru, Nirish, must not have looked at his latest drop very long before he emailed it over to be posted.

If he did, he would have realized, that like the funniest joke in the world from Monty Python, this is so funny, it may be lethal.

As you know, we've been heavily float-biased since the market bottomed on July 13th. For those of you with longer term outlooks that have actually attended float club meeting for weeks at a time have seen some great gains though we've had to endure some scary interludes when MBS. And even though this phenomenon of "higher highs" and "higher lows" commonly contains plenty of back and forth on the price curve, MBS have been especially volatile. We haven't seen many better float opportunities than today. We took a massive beating yesterday, still, techs are heavily in our favor, spreads are wide, fear of "no bailout" is priced into the market, loan quality is improving. Sure, there is that whole "no money to lend" thing if something doesn't happen to mitigate the disaster, but look at it this way: if it doesn't happen, we'll all be too busy converting our cars into post-apocolyptic roller derby machines and driving to the thunderdome to care about MBS.

Whatever the case, it doesn't seem that a soul can be found that can convince anyone that he/she has a bona fide plan to both calm the convulsing markets AND pacify both the practical and ideological concerns about John Q Public.

So all we can do is wait... and HOPE that common sense prevails.

So without further ado, we proudly announce our first ever quarterly theme: HOPE! (just wait, this is going to tie into Nirish's pic, we promise!).

And therefor, the more "hope" you can muster, the more you'd be inclined to float. You could almost say "Hope Floats."

Who better to personify this notion than two of the men upon whom so much of our hope is riding. You may have already figured out what you are about to scroll down and see, and so you are prepared to be disturbed. That is a valid fear. But prepare ye also for some serious LoL's. Scroll down when ready...

If you incur any hospital bills from lack of oxygen, ruptured blood vessels, etc... Please direct your bills to Nirish. Compliments for the concept though, just send here. Hey! There will be more nasty downticks to endure ere our journey together adjorns. So we do what we can to keep our spirits up in spite of the tumult we know we must face.