Is this working?

Vacation time, I imagine.

Historically it slows during summer. Let the stock market rise a little more and it will pick up.

Skip suggested that things slow down when the markets are down, but nothing picked up in the last few days - until today.

I've been trying to compile a few ideas to spark discussion, but I, too, haven't been able to be around much this last week or two.

The spammers haven't taken a vacation, though. FWIW. In fact, I think there's been a pick-up in spam over the last couple of weeks.

--david

Yes! My guess is that interest in stocks and talk about stocks rises and falls in a way that parallels the rise and fall of the stock market itself. When the market is up, there is a lot of discussion of stocks and mutual funds, attention paid to stocks in the business sections of newspapers, articles about stocks in magazines, and sales pitches and advertisements of many types about opportunities in various funds, schemes, strategies, etc. And when the market is down all of those things are less evident. I could swear the local bookstores have fewer get-rich-quick books on the shelves nowadays than back during the boom days.