true, true...however, i consider politics to be crucial to market activity, and i also admit that i took on a quest to convince everyone here that GWB is a lead balloon for the economy and thus our livelihoods...but i don't think that i need to keep at it any longer...i think the point has been made... but you are right. i do waste tons of time during the day with that (and on ET) and starting this week i am trying to change that... aphie -- i agree with you 100%. intraday is harder, but i also find holding overnight positions to be extremely stressful, and since i am retail, i also cannot tie up alot of capital on overnights. i feel like i have become a very good intraday trader, but lately with the chop it is hard to let profits run while cutting losses, and thus lately i have been slow bleeding, mostly losing just commissions at the end of the day...getting traded thru and pennied seems to happen much more lately, and the liquidity is simply terrible. i find it extremely risky to hold stocks that i do not know very well overnight, and thus i do not want to go back to a strategy of scanning for stocks to position over a period of weeks or days. i will position the two stocks that i trade when there is a setup that is profitable, but since january i haven't been taking many overnights mostly from fear of being long (terrorism) or short (captured terrorists)...IMO, holding overnights is very similar to just trading futures overnight, and the markets are random enough that i am less interested in holding overnights...i don't have time to keep track of what news, earnings, etc. will be coming each day, and that has more to do with taking positions than anything else...trading two very active stocks is hard enough...