I know what you mean by that comment as a generalisation but balls and trading ought not to go together. I don't consider this a crash, althought the puppet TV has done its utmost to brainwash people into fearful reactions. The crash is yet to come and you correctly preceive the ticking bomb, but I think the smart money has set this up nicely to transfer the wealth yet again. A tight stop trade on a proven trendline isn't balls, it's a no brainer.
I waited 2 years to short oil.. then put friends and family into straddles and strangles (OIH) when oil was in upper 120s looking for oil to be in 80-90s by late summer... was still holding long puts until I took some off table today.. and rolled out and down in 1/4 amount... but added calls again! Morale of story for me is you can make 2-5 trades all year and come out better than trading every day (like I used to do when I did this full-time back in 2006)
You're right about the technical pullback on the channel line. And continual Government props and uncertainty should provide a nice short term bounce. Marc Faber says the total cost of the bailout will reach 5 TRILLION. Whatever asset "deflation" (Return to mean) we have now, will see a nice rally once that liquidity hits the books. <object type="application/x-shockwave-flash" data="http://www.eyeblast.tv/public/eyeblast.swf?v=e4kUkU6U6U" width="518" height="419"><param name="movie" value="http://www.eyeblast.tv/public/eyeblast.swf?v=" /><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true" /><embed src="http://www.eyeblast.tv/public/eyeblast.swf?v=e4kUkU6U6U" width="518" height="419" /></object>
Problem is no one knows for sure. It's an accounting nightmare and I've seen is guessimated at 10 trillion. In any event $700Bn is pissing in a galeforce wind when this hits home.
Found this on TSCM, pretty interesting analysis of the 1974 bottom and corresponding news flow. Markets tend to bottom before 'good news', not after the fact. A. June: New car sales drop 24%. B. August: More Watergate disclosures, heavy selling. C. August: President Nixon resigns. D. October: Franklin National Bank collapses in biggest bank failure in U.S. history. E. October: Public pulls in horns as U.S. begins to slide into the worst recession since the 1930s. F. December: New car sales down 34%, housing starts at eight-year low.
For some strange reason ET won't let me start a thread with this. Anyway, here's the real crash coming... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h9-tBGxVU6o
Cutten, i agree. Happy to be buying here and selling puts at ridiculous prices. We might go down another 20%. Who cares? It's time to buy. And we will get a bounce, regardless of whether we go lower or not, and when we do i'll decide then whether to sell into it. I haven't seen this much opportunity in a long time. It may take ten or twenty years for the economy to recover, who knows? I'm buying.
Thats all well and good but how does one propose to catch the falling knife? What metric do we use to anticipate the curtailment of bad news?