Neither the total cost of the war in Iraq nor the Afghanistan war is known. Congressional appropriation for military operations associated with the 9/11 attacks as of March 2011 is $1.3 trillion. This amount does not include interest on borrowing nor future veterans benefits. www.fas.org/sgp/crs/natsec/RL33110.pdf Some independent economist's estimates for minimum total costs of these military operations range from 3 to 4 Trillion, depending on the assumptions made. Using the lowest minimum total cost estimate of 3 Trillion results in a per capita cost of about 10K$. Obviously, these estimates are subject to very large errors. Most of the cost has been incurred following President Bush's "Mission Accomplished" announcement. This should serves as a sober reminder that starting a war is an open ended financial commitment where neither time nor cost is known. Good traders consider such high risk commitments to be foolish. We want to know the worst case outcome before making the commitment.
It would have been cheaper, cost fewer wasted deaths, and built something for the future if "we" had simply raised petro taxes to the point where imports from the region became too small to worry about.
There, I'm GMT-5 so at 22:40 up 18.00. No wonder everybody who posts here has such weird times on their posts. I was beginning to think I was the last U.S. trader left.
A tad over 1%. It's good, but no big deal. Nothing out of the ordinary, ES, NQ, and YM are all up just over 1%.
Did I say that? I just asked if it was good. And yes, a 1% move in my account while not historical was a good move for the day.
At anyrate, I was having a civil discussion with another trader and my position was that those old 1.50 stops don't work anymore. And he politely disagreed, and told me that if I understood VIX I would see that that is still not too tight. So if 18 points is no big deal and 1.50 stops are still good it must be a golden age for ES traders.