Useful recipes for smartasses................. Some useful recipes for the all the smartasses who were posting a while back (since August 2007) how as everyone on ET was negative it was time to go long. Lucky you are just papertrading, eh? (yes, we can tell). The public buys the last bull market. http://www.crowbusters.com/recipes.htm Also some reading matter for you to peruse while you are waiting for someone to ring the bell that marks the bottom: From ROSO: "The tyro knows nothing, and everybody, including himself, knows it. But the next, or second, grade thinks he knows a great deal and makes others feel that way too. He is the experienced sucker, who has studied not the market itself but a few remarks about the market made by a still higher grade of suckers. The second-grade sucker knows how to keep from losing his money in some of the ways that get the raw beginner. It is this semisucker rather than the 100 per cent article who is the real all-the-year-round support of the commission houses. He lasts about three and a half years on an average, as compared with a single season of from three to thirty weeks, which is the usual Wall street life of a first offender. It is naturally the semisucker who is always quoting the famous trading aphorisms and the various rules of the game. He knows all the don'ts that ever fell from the oracular lips of the old stagers excepting the principal one, which is: Don't be a sucker! This semisucker is the type that thinks he has cut his wisdom teeth because he loves to buy on declines. He waits for them. He measures his bargains by the number of points it has sold off from the top. In big bull markets the plain unadulterated sucker, utterly ignorant of rules and precedents, buys blindly because he hopes blindly. He makes most of the money until one of the healthy reactions takes it away from him at one fell swoop." In other words, it works until it doesn't or "it's the last dip that does the damage". Don't get me wrong, I have had my fair share of uses for the above recipes and will do again, but the smartass remarks from people who clearly have not been through this before got to me to the point where I am going to do myself no good and generate some negative kharma- or maybe not, my intention beneath the cruelty is actually good, and maybe my post will make some see that trite contrarianism may sound good, but is not always valid. My sympathy to those who are caught with losses.