In case you have the time to read the new bill, here it is...all 451 pages of it. http://senateconservatives.files.wordpress.com/2008/10/bailouttext.pdf By the way...this bill is 436 pages longer than the US Constitution.
How did that bargain hunting go for you guys? Since you guys both felt the need to educate me two weeks ago, I'll take my turn here. Just because the market drops sharply, it doesn't automatically mean there's a buying opportunity. Are we there yet? I don't know, but we're getting closer. I would say 7500 is definitely a buying opportunity but we may be there now. The most important thing is that there's no number to put on it, just some indication that things are at least starting to turn around. I plan to remain on the sidelines for the time being.
saw the suze orman lady on larry king last night (first time im listened to her--always thought she was some new age health nut). she said something fast and i dont quite get it (or remember it exactly). something about how stock trading can get bad and they freeze trading and you can lose your money, completely. as i understood it, her point wasnt that a stock can go from $62 to $1.62 and you effectively lose your money, but that you really lose all the money. you have no stock anymore. can anyone clear this up.
As an overall strategy this is what the gurus preach. My question is, when people say, don't sell if you don' need your money for 5 years because it will come back, my opinion is, i will sell then by back lower and avoid the down turn while getting a piece of the upside. Of course, I glaze over the fact that timing the market is next to impossible, but hey, it's always fun to try.
Rex,there were people that held on to their stocks in 1929 .IF ....IF the company didn't go belly up , costing them everything, they got even again ...IN 1954.25 years to get back to even seems a bit long. This could be BLACK friday...we may hit 7500 today ,not in december has I said before.
Well, pardon the hell out of us. I actually enjoy getting better educated. :grin: I speculated on one stock that was clearly very near its bottom and I'm waiting on trigger targets for two others that I've wanted and have been waiting for them to dip. This is the mother of all dips if you've been waiting for one. Sure it does. Everybody has his buying point, but a trough is a better time to buy than a peak. You don't have to buy at the absolute bottom spike to make money if it goes back up. :huh: Since no one knows the bottom (or the top), it makes no sense to bet everything on buy or sell at some magic point that we'll all miss. So I sell incrementally near the highs and buy incrementally near the lows to spread the risk. I don't have to nail the turnaround point to take some advantage of the ups and downs. :thumb: When the curves are flat is when I make poor decisions . . . :sob:
We could also bottom today and start back up (I'm not predicting that). In 1987 there was a sharp crash, the Black Monday decline was the largest one-day percentage decline in stock market history . . . but holders got their money back in 14 months.
The history of the market would indicate a sharp rise is coming. In 9 of the last 10 times where the market has lost more than 10% of its value it has regained it in less than 2 years. In the market's history 100% of 10 year periods and something like 98% of 5 year periods have been in the black. The best strategy is if you are buying good stuff keep buying it. Timing the market is too hard. Buy buy buy and dollar cost averaging will catch you up. Investors do that. Speculators try and time the market, and sometimes they make a lot of money, but often times they lose their it all. I would say the last year has been a great buying oppurtunity, and the last several days have been like the day after Christmas sales.
