I often say that it’s no longer about who you know, but what you know. The fact is that “who” you know does matter, but my point is that in this digital age when you can reach out and communicate with just about anyone if you’re diligent enough, that “what” you know matters more to “who” you know than “who” you know matters to your success, however you may define it.

At any rate, as a result of diligently writing thousands of posts and articles for TheStreet.com, I ended up friends with Mitch Rose, rock n roll agent to the stars at CAA. Mitch was in town for Eric Clapton’s concerts with Steve Winwood at Madison Square Garden this week.
And did he ever hook me up last night. After a fascinating discussion on how the Rock n Roll Hall of Fame works with the president of the RnR HoF himself, Joel Peresman, and a challenging discussion on the impact that the Internet will have on all forms of content (video, audio and text) at McCormick & Schmidt’s, we headed down the concert, entering through the back of MSG and taking an elevator straight to the amazing seats we had just feet from the stage.

And what a show. Eric was amazing. So effortless. You’d watch and sorta forget how amazing the technical and melodic sounds he’s making are, and then at times you’d have this flash of, “Holy moly…that sequence just floated by, then ripped through, before it collapsed in my head.”

The first half of the show was steady and fun…it was after they’d warmed up for an hour or so that the show really kicked it up a gear.

Clapton’s acoustic version of Eric Johnson’s “Ramblin’ on My Mind” took the original and somehow modernized for the crowd despite being so true to the original.

I often wonder what Mozart would think of Eric Johnson’s work. Or what Beethoven would think of the Beatles for that matter.

And Winwood’s solo take on “Georgia” settled us down into a zen-like zone right before they kicked up the last part of the concert with Clapton and Hendrix originals.

Little Wing. Oh man, that was awesome.

One of the best concerts I’ve ever been to. A beautiful night, really. I’d be remiss not to add that even as I’m not a star-struck kinda-guy, and I wouldn’t trade the night as it went for anything (you never want to look back, anyway, right?), my date and I did split off from Mitch and Brooks from SportsByBrooks.com once at the concert and they eventually headed backstage and hit the after parties afterward. Fact is, I know I’m gonna hear about sacrificing meeting Slowhand. But I gotta be me.

Happy Hour Friday’s are always fun and full of surprises…We have the following guests booked for this evening:

-Shibani Joshi, Fox Business

-Jonathan Blue, Chairman Blue Equity

-Kevin Boothe, Offensive Guard NY Giants

-John Ferguson, President and CEO Corrections Corporation of America

-Connell McShane, Fox Business Channel

-Shira Lazar, Entertainment Reporter

Nicole Petallides is sitting in for Rebecca Gomez this evening. Join Cody and Nicole for a live Happy Hour at the Bull and Bear at 5:00– or catch them at 5:00 and 11:00pm on Time Warner channel 43, RCN channel 194, Verizon channel 94, AT&T channel 211 and Direct TV channel 359.

Reading this article from the AP by Joseph White as part of my preparation for tonight’s show…I found it interesting that National Thoroughbred Racing Association CEO Alexander Waldrop was brought in to testify to the same panel about steroid use among horses in horse racing as David Stern, Roger Goodell and Gene Upshaw, were to talk about steroid use in human sports.

The article talks about how hard it is to test athletes for HGH.

I assume they mean Human Growth Hormone. But as I just Googled “Horse Growth Hormone”.  Are you surprised that it’s out there?

And you just know there’s a lot of use of that kind of HGH among racehorses. And undetectable.

Forget Clemens and McNamee. Let’s subpoena Curlin and his trainers.

A circus is a circus, no?

We have the following guests booked for Happy Hour tonight:

-Scott Rothbort, Founder LakeView Asset Management

-Dr. Dan Hill, Sensory Logic

-Bob Tulsiani, Analyst JupiterResearch

-Terry Keenan, Fox News

-Allen Adamson, Managing Director Landor

-Ryan Grant, Running Back Green Bay Packers

-Justin Tuck, Defensive End Giants

Rebecca Gomez is out today and Tracy Byrnes will be sitting in for her. Check out Happy Hour at 5:00 and 11:00pm on channel 43.

I made the joke the other day with some of my colleagues that I’d become emotionally bankrupt. I was exaggerating, but man, I’d hit an emotional low a few weeks ago. I’d also made the joke that I wished I could buy calls on my emotional state, because it was certainly at a sentimental low.

Nothing like catching your breath again, and were I now long those options, I’d probably peel a few of them off now to catch my breath and still keep plenty of exposure to the upside. Wouldn’t it be great to trade options on your own emotions? You could roll your emotional call options up when they’re close to expiring but you know you’ve got momentum. And when things in your personal life are going awful, you could either load up on puts if you’re the greedy type or at least hedge yourself for the downside.

I’m surprised that in this Web 2.3 bubble (ooh, great new term for this phase of the net…we’re not hardly past 2.0 and certainly not at 3.0, but we’re moving…) that I’ve not seen the pitch from some PR firm for some Stanford grad’s social network full of options trading, real or paper, on your own emotions yet.

Or at least some pitch from some kid on his couch in his living room with a model and site up in beta.

All of which begs the question if you could then be sued for insider trading, I suppose.

And with that, I’ll get my Judge Judy fix and head onto bed.

I’ve been a fan of Whoopi since my old friend Neil got his first break in Clara’s Heart after being discovered at an acting camp in Las Cruces.

But I’ve never seen more than maybe 30 seconds at a time of The View. With Whoopi booked for the show tonight, I’m watching this show for the first time. Strange job, I have, in that I never would have pictured growing up in Ruidoso or playing hoops at UNM or working at Oppenheimer that watching a women’s day time talk show would be “work”. I’m getting paid for watching this?

I’ve definitely become a student of talk show TV in the last few months, and this The View show you can see, really has put it together, with amazing guests, lots of production…

Happy Hour’s Quick Shots, one of my favorite segments, sure takes some theme from the Hot Topics segment on The View, eh?

Whoopi’s asking Sheri Shephard just now, “Who’s your brother in law…Fred Sanford?” That got me laughing out loud.

I used to poke fun at the permabears and the mainstream media for constantly grabbing any negative datapoint and doing their best Fred, “Oh, this is the big one. I’m coming to join ya’ Elizabeth” proclamations of economic doom.

Problem is that with all these bailouts and bubbles that we’re living through right now really are going to bring a big one some day.

But I am thinking spring of 2008 is probably going to be as okay as Fred was during that long, glorious run of Sanford & Son.

Happy Hour has some exciting guests lined up for tonight:

-Whoopi Goldberg, Co-Host The View

-Steve Cohen, The Millionaire’s Magician

-Tonya Reiman, Author- The Power of Body Language

-Sean Udall, Minyanville.com

-Timothy Lewis, Partner CRG Partners Group

-Gillian Murphy, Senior Vice President and General Manager at MGM Grand at Foxwoods

-Jeffrey Frankel, Stuart Frankel

Catch Happy Hour at 5:00 and 11:00pm on channel 43.

August 1995 and I came back to the apartment I shared with my UNM basketball teammate, friend, all-WAC first teamer, Marlow White, because I’d forgotten my company cell phone, one of of those big black brick Motorola ones that were the first “handheld” back in the early 1990s. Across the sidewalk lived my teammate, friend, first round draft choice of the Miami Heat, Charles Smith, and a kid who’d sat out that year for something or another.

To be clear at the onset, I was resentful of all of them (not to mention my girl friend at the time who was on scholarship with volleyball team, if I’m to be perfectly honest with myself frankly) for being on scholarship and being from out of state but being able to live rent-free with a per diem on scholarship while I was working 50 hours a week saving up money for school and rent working at a civil engineering firm.

I’d come home as I was wont to do and had bagel dogs with Ranch Style beans, a banana and celery and watched bad talk show TV for lunch. Marlow was coming in to pick up some books or something as I headed out not realizing I’d forgotten that brick.

When I came back, it wasn’t in the apartment. I was running very late to get back to the office now, and so I figured I’d just find it later. Ah, but as I headed back out the door, I saw through the glass doors across the sidewalk that our sat-year-out friend was chatting away on my company phone sitting on his lazy boy. He saw me as I stormed towards the door and he hung it up, waving with a hopeful grin on his face. I came in grabbed the brick from his hand and asked him what the hell he was thinking.

“Relax,” he told me, cool as ice, given he had five inches and thirty pounds on me, “It’s just your company phone. It don’t cost you nothing. I just used it to call my aunt in Dallas.”

Of course my company checked the records like a hawk given that the charge per minute for local calls were like 10 cents a minute and long distance was on top of that. I’d never made a long distance call on the thing. And told him all of this.

He got defensive and came back with a “don’t whine” kind of comment.

I was really late for work at this point and turned to the door, saying, “Man, you’ll never steal anything from me again. Seriously.”

“Or what?”

I turned back, foolishly like a kid who’s resentful and now angered by his team-mate who has that scholarship and guaranteed chance on the team and who just caused him some serious problems at work and is now talking trash, and said, “You’ll never steal from me again. Seriously.”

He lunged at me and slammed me to the ground, throwing punches to the side of my head with his left fist (he’d always been easy to cover because he so favored his left so). I used the force of the landing to free myself from him and jump back up. He tackled me again and as we both threw punches back and forth as we wrestled on that horribly stiff carpet as Marlow and Charles came back in and broke us up.

I changed shirts and headed straight into the office where they were waiting for me to pick up a package to take to a downtown client. That drive in was a trip — the adrenaline was still flowing and things moving in slow motion as they do when you’ve been pushed to the fundamentals of violence like that. My boss, a pretty 30-something divorcee who was very nice but didn’t like her job because she didn’t have a clear career path, saw me as I tried to sneak in and grab the package and head right back out. She could clearly see that I’d been in a tumble of some sort, as my eye was scratched and puffy.

I told her what had happened, and of course she felt horrible for me and was very nice and even sent me home early with pay before the day was over.

Tensions ran pretty high around the duplex after that, as you can imagine. The summer ended just a couple weeks later and me and UNM Coach, Dave Bliss parted ways…which only increased my resentment of course. I still can’t bring myself to watch college basketball. And when I look back at that fight, which I do believe is my last one, though I did get suckerpunched a year later in the gym getting stitches in the lip and everything, I wonder about this quote from Yoda:

“Fear is the path to the dark side. Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering.”

What is it I feared that day, that summer? Resentment and then theft leads to anger too. That doesn’t sound quite wise enough for Yoda though, does it? And really, I have to say, there wasn’t that much suffering out of that fight either, though neither of us looked or felt better.

And, yes, I lost the fight.

PS.  I feel rusty, writing.

On the comments area of my Bullish on Google post, I got a question from loyal reader, SD:

For perspective, on a trade like this which particular calls would you likely buy and what percentage of your capital would you risk on the trade? Thank you.

It’s funny….I used to not answer that question, when I was running money and writing my blog on TheStreet.com. Options aren’t nearly as liquid as stocks and I’d often be writing about my ideas and trades in real time as I’d be finishing up getting an order filled and it’d be doing a fiduciary mis-duty to my partners were I to send readers to bid up those same options as I’d be trying to finish up the order. Even writing the ideas at all, I suppose, risked costing some performance if there were ever enough capital liking whatever idea I’d written about and then randomly picked exactly the same options I’d been bidding on…paranoia will destroy ya’….but let’s get back on focus here…and, this wasn’t funny, btw, Cody.

As far as the options I’d have been looking at today — I’d probably want a couple quarters of time here, some sorta deep in the money, others slightly out of the money calls…looks like we’ve got the September 400s for our in the money call idea. And we’ve got the September 550s also, for our our of the money idea.

And how much capital? Maybe 1% or 2% or so if I were in a typical aggressive mode, or 1/2 of 1% were I more cautious for whatever reason.

When it comes to common, maybe 5% or so into a single common stock position sometimes and sometimes more than that, though not often.

How’s that for a firm answer? There’s a reason for that.

I’m answering this question from the perspective of what I used to do running aggressive tech money. I’m not sure there’s any “right” way to allocate capital. On any scale, really, whether talking about the rich college kid risking capital to learn to trade or the 30 year old Silicon Valley surfer tech dude or the 50 year old housewife, much less the fund of funds, the mutual funds and other institutional money.

Google’s a high beta (meaning it’s more volatile than the market — click here and look halfway down the right side of the page and you’ll see “Beta: 1.71″, which simply means it’s 1.71 times more volatile than the market usually) and options are always risky since they expire after a while…so any money betting on this stuff is wildly volatile at times. Any money that’s being bet on options and stocks is going to be at times, of course.

Take this post, as you should all of these, as education, not advice. I’m just trying to call it like I see it and feel it. All of which underscores why I keep saying it’s easier to be bullish than long.

Then again, I’m gonna log off and watch some TV now. Which, I suppose is work, since I’ll be studying talk shows and will study tonight’s Happy Hour later too. Always under pressure.

Today’s Happy Hour guests will include:

-Andrew Keen, Author The Cult of the Amateur–How the Internet is Killing Our Culture and Assaulting Our Economy

-Todd Harrison, Minyanville.com

-Rob Nichols, Financial Services Forum

-Brenda Strong, Desperate Housewives

-Father Jonathan Morris, Catholic Priest and Fox News Contributor

-Kim Campbell, Former Canadian Prime Minister

-Nataliya Izosimova, Foundation for Effective Governance

-Wladimir Klitschko, World Heavyweight Champion

We will also have a phone visit with Cody’s mom…

Check out Happy Hour at 5:00 and 11:00pm on channel 43.