But, I had been looking at various trading ideas and wanted to capture a shorter-term gain for a trading account. The market has been so tough this year. When the recent rally in the indexes started, I didn't want to become part of the group that was desperate to get in on the action, only to expose my portfolio to more risk than necessary. Believe me, when you're afraid of missing a rally, you just might end up with some bad timing.

The venture capital (VC) industry demonstrated its commitment to the clean technology space in the second quarter of 2009, pumping $1.2 billion into the sector, according to a report by GTM Research. VC investments in cleantech are up 43.5% from the first quarter of the year, when $836 was put into play in the cleantech space.

The number of transactions increased, as well. In the first quarter, 59 deals were completed, and deal-flow surged 44% to 85 in the quarter just finished. Average deal size remained fairly consistent: $14.2 million for the first quarter and $14.1 for the second.

Rumor has it that Nortel Networks (OTC: NRTLQ) will sell its enterprise division in the near future.

This would be part of a broader plan to break the company apart instead of trying to restructure its way out of bankruptcy. The company is planning to sell its CDMA and LTE wireless businesses to Nokia (NYSE: NOK) for $650 million -- the first unit sale since the January bankruptcy filing.

I was wrong about Jabil Circuit (NYSE JBL). When I wrote about the tech company's last earnings report, I said I wasn't a buyer. I should have been. The stock rose quite a bit after I presented my thoughts to the world. In fact, the stock closed up well over 7% on Tuesday, settling out to a price of $7.12 per share. Volume was extremely active.

Obviously, investors were setting themselves up ahead of the Q3 release. Jabil earned, on an adjusted basis, 4 cents per share. According to Reuters, the market was only counting on 2 cents per share.

Kodak's announcement today is evidence that sentimentality is dead in 21st century business.

The film world has, after all, been moping since Polaroid stopped producing its iconic instant camera film in early 2008 (take heart, Polaroid fans, "The Impossible Project" is working to reinvent instant film in an old Polaroid factory in the Netherlands). But today Eastman Kodak (NYSE: EK) said it was halting production of the complex-yet-storied Kodachrome film, immediately. Not only does the product make up less than 1% of its worldwide still-picture film sales; it's extraordinarily expensive to produce.

It's only a stopgap measure, everyone knows. It's a temporary reprieve for XP. Just the same, netbooks are allowing XP, the operating system Microsoft tore from its loyal public last year, to make a comeback.

Last year I tried to get a new computer but was so badly abused by Vista I took it back and reformatted my old computer so I could avoid the demanding operating system.

I was looking around today for a stock to buy. I came up empty-handed. One of my ideas was Activision Blizzard (NASDAQ: ATVI). I was intrigued this week by reports that said the company wants to have the launch to end all launches for the next Call of Duty title. Quite frankly, I think there's a chance the company will succeed with this. So, naturally, my thoughts turned to shares of Activision Blizzard as a possible buy candidate. Although I already own the stock in a longer-term, taxed portfolio, I wanted a trade for my Roth IRA.

Well, I couldn't buy the company. It's up today (3% at the time of this writing), and I do not want to buy any stock when it's up. Not now, at any rate. The market has come too far too fast, in my opinion, and I want to trade carefully. But, while looking at Activision Blizzard, I came across this article from Ben Kuchera over at Ars Technica. He discusses comments made by the publisher's CEO, Bobby Kotick, on Sony Corporation (NYSE: SNE) and its PlayStation platforms.

Cloud computing is a type of on-demand hosting services on the internet. Not only a necessity for mainstream e-commerce sites, it also increases efficiency, is scalable, and lowers expenses. The monetary savings may be misleading to consumers and businesses who do not fully understand the potential risks involved.

With a pay-as-you-go type structure, users are only charged for the amount of traffic, bandwidth, and memory used. Online businesses become more efficient by only utilizing the storage and space needed, while also being assured capacity for any usage increases. The buzz has been building for years, so cloud computing has attracted a diverse customer base, ranging from popular social networks such as Twitter and Facebook, to educational websites of Arizona State and Northwestern University.

Adobe Systems (NASDAQ: ADBE) said it earned 35 cents per share on an adjusted basis in the second quarter in a press release issued after the bell on Tuesday. Was it enough? Well, not exactly. According to the earnings preview, the market was betting on Adobe to make just that amount. Yep, it's that whole confusing Wall Street thing. Meet expectations, and you don't really pass the test.

Meeting expectations in this climate should be considered cool, though. And let's not forget that the software company did okay on the revenue side. Sales came in at roughly $705 million. The market was expecting about $10 million less.

There's been some news on the Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN) Kindle, the company's electronic substitute for real paper books. According to this source, everything is coming along fine for the product from a statistical point of view. An estimate of Kindle sales from Citigroup Global Markets puts the number of units sold last year at 500,000. By 2010, it's said that the Kindle may lead to $1.2 billion of derivative sales. I was surprised to learn that this sales number would possibly represent 4% of Amazon's top line.

As expected, chip maker National Semiconductor (NYSE: NSM), whose colleagues include Advanced Micro Devices (NYSE: AMD), Intel (NASDAQ: INTC), and Texas Instruments (NYSE: TXN), lost money during its fourth quarter.

However, the loss wasn't as bad as feared. According to Trey Thoelcke's earnings preview, National Semiconductor could have lost up to 42 cents per share. Thankfully, according to the company's press release posted on Thursday after the bell, the business only lost 28 cents per share.

How thankful should we be? I must point out that the company earned 34 cents per share in last year's Q4 period. Also, sales dropped 39% during the past three months. Not only that, but cash from operations from the full fiscal year was down, as was the gross margin on a year-over-year basis (the gross margin increased, however, on a sequential basis compared to the third quarter, so that was a bright spot).