<p>The market is reacting to panic, and the public is feeding it well. It’s hard to sit tight with our major losses, but I plan not to push the panic button. If the market goes to 1000, I think financial losses may be the least of our worries here in the US (and globally).</p>
<p>We got the OEX jam to kill the puts. Well, a few of them anyways. My streamer partially froze so I didn’t see it in time to jump in. Oh well, next week.</p>
<p>That Michael Lewis article was a stunner. I think that people who have been paying attention know that mortgage debt was packaged up and sliced into tranches rated from AAA to BBB. But who knew that the BBB tranche was being re-sliced and ending up with an AAA tranche? To me, that’s the smoking gun. </p>
<p>And who knew that shorting the subprime bond market would create a fantasy market just as large as the real one…only the money traded and ultimately lost as the house of cards imploded was just as real as if it had been invested in a market based on real property? Even the few traders who knew this and realized the magnitude of the issue (such as those at FrontPoint) were unfortunately part of the problem.</p>
<p>The End of Wall Street? I don’t think so. Heads rolled after Enron and Worldcom. Where are the charges against Moody’s?</p>
<p>ok…so I just woke up since i posted this thread…JK…and in response to garland’s earlier question (and what I meant when I said that I didn’t necessarily have the stomach for it)…</p>
<p>1)If I had sold on Thursday (at the lows of the day), yesterday would have given me a stomach ache.</p>
<p>2)Dstark is on the money; the market is all about psychology and, sometimes, surprise…nobody was talking about the NYfed guy for treasury secretary (or I missed it while I was sleeping…LOL)</p>
<p>3)“If everybody could sell at 8,000 and buy it back at 6,000 we would all be doing it”…yup…good luck trying to figure out the bottom…</p>
<p>4) the only thing we haven’t discussed here is daily volume which happens to influence this ridiculous swings…in addition, keep your eyes on the shorts in the market this week; nobody is going to want to go home for turkey day with a “hanging short” when Obama is in the middle of announcing cabinet appointments (see yesterday…if you went home after lunch with a short position from Thursday, you’d have a stomach ache too…!)</p>
<p>Yesterday was OEX. The market has dropped a lot in the past month and put buyers were rolling in the dough. Traders (the ones I know) were buying Wednesday (at the close), Thursday and Friday looking for a jam to kill the put holders. Some of them did okay, some did great. Some, no doubt, get stopped out.</p>
<p>That’s why we call it scam week.</p>
<p>I got stopped out on Friday morning after going long on Thursday. Unfortunately 1 ATR was insufficient.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>These so called “Independent Rating Agencies” are a scam that Wall St. has perpetrated on the public going back years and with government approval. </p>
<p>Ques.:</p>
<p>Who pays these firms to access the quality and safety of a financial instrument?</p>
<p>Ans.:</p>
<p>The issuer of that financial instrument does.</p>
<p>The higher the rating the more the issuer can charge investors. This conflict of interest is a glaring and open secret. It’s the same as a book publisher or a movie producer hiring the reviewer of their choice. The tacit understanding is Bad Review = no future work. It’s OK to downgrade these pigs, but only AFTER they are off Wall St’s books and in the hands of a gullible public. People need to go to prison for what has happened but don’t hold your breath. When it comes to matters regarding Wall St, the financial industry owns our lawmakers in exactly the same way they own the Rating Agencies. Both are bought and paid for.</p>
<p>With Obama, things will change.</p>
<p>“I got stopped out on Friday morning after going long on Thursday. Unfortunately 1 ATR was insufficient.”</p>
<p>The options writers did a good job at killing the calls and the puts. Though the calls have been killed for a while. But that mid-morning dip was a call killer. OEX week is tough to play because of the volatility. If you play it well, you can make a ton. There are lots of weeks where I’d rather just stay out during the week.</p>
<p>I figure I’ve lost about $60,000 this year in equities. Good thing my daughter’s cost of college attendance is largely paid for by her merit scholarships.</p>
<p>The stop was significantly below the low of 2001-2003 in the S&P. I figured I was pretty safe after Thursday. I expected that low would be breached but I figured that this would happen first quarter of next year after the 4th quarter of this year’s earnings were reported. I was definitely surprised.</p>
<p>I was just saying to my husband that one of the best things about weekends right now is that we are not frantically and continuously watching the moves of the stockmarket!</p>
<p>Can’t sleep through it because we have a small amount of stock outside of IRAs (husband is retired) and foolishly borrowed against it in a margin account rather than sell the stock that was doing so well. Will never do that again (even if the opportunity were to arise in the far distant future)!. As that particular stock has plummeted we have had to meet numerous margin calls in the last month. We watch it very closely because our income is low enough to qualify for the automatic 0 EFC for financial aid but if they sell just 1 of those very low value shares we would not qualify any more. Could make the difference between my older child staying in college and not (the younger has good merit money and would still have a low EFC because she was in school full time all year so earnings are below the protected allowances. The older one has just returned to school and his earnings from before that would knock him out of grant eligibility if he no longer qualified for the automatic 0 - they were not high and all went on rent and bills). As for our IRA which is where our income comes from - I don’t even want to look at that. I can’t wait for this year to be over.</p>
<p>I wonder how much of the continuous drop is because of margin calls that people cannot meet?</p>
<p>I’m worried about a continuous drop towards the end of December. Its a bit surprising that we haven’t had a good ride up that lasted a few months as typically happens in bear markets.</p>
<p>I fluctuate between wanting to move all my money out of the stock market and into the money market fund and wanting to move all my money that is sitting in money market into the stock market. </p>
<p>So for now I am half in stocks and half in money market, and I don’t do anything- except worry- that I am too long- or too short!</p>
<p>We had a good part of our 401K in the cash market - bought into some stocks when we thought they must be close to the bottom. We were wrong! They popped up for a while and we thought - yay! Now they are lower. Sigh. Have been trying to live on smoke and air and federal pension (ha ha ha - hysterical laughter - that just about covers our medical premiums and husbands prescriptions - will be much worse next year when he is forced into med D for prescriptions thanks to his ex employer deciding to screw their retirees despite all those amazing profits oil companies were making earlier in the year) so as not to withdraw money from our 401K while it is at such a low value.</p>
<p>Its almost a guarantee that when you think you should make a move, it will be the wrong one. That’s the way “Mr. Market” works - maximize the greatest loss for the most number of investors.</p>
<p>^^^ I think I would make a great investment adviser. My advice - watch what I do with my money - then do the opposite! :rolleyes:</p>