It is always amusing to see the end of the day gain or loss in the indexes, and how it sometimes hides the wild action of the day. Today was one of those days - we gapped down (bearish), rallied from what appeared to be a test of support (bullish), gave that all up and tested new lows - 1260 (bearish), and then reversed and rallied to the highs of the day (bullish). For all that action and headache, it just took us back to right near where we closed yesterday. But it scared and/or emboldened traders multiple times, in completely different directions. Absolutely nuts - as they say in bear markets neither bulls nor bears have an easy time making money (the strongest rallies are usually contained within bear markets, but they are sudden and out of the blue).Here is a ...

The stock market is falling swiftly, and you don’t have the luxury of time. So I’ll get straight to the point:

If you haven’t done so already in response to our many earlier warnings, you’d better sell or hedge your vulnerable investments now. If you don’t, be prepared to suffer far deeper losses in the bear market of 2008 and beyond.

But beware: Most brokers will try to talk you out of it. They have a hidden agenda. They want to keep you as a customer; and they know that, once customers sell their stocks, they often close their brokerage accounts.

With this in mind, many brokers have been trained with up to seven sales pitches designed to keep you in the market come hell or high water.

Broker Pitch #1: …

A couple of great questions came in on the Seeking Alpha version of this morning's post about run-of-the-mill bear markets and I thought it would be useful to post the questions here and how I answered them.Why do you think we won't have a decline similar to what we had in '00-'03, which was a lot more than 30%?Markets cut in half every so often; the great depression, the mid 1970's; the start of this decade and I also know there was a depression in the 1870's but do not know what the market did then, there was also a bank panic in 1907 that lead to a 37% decline that year. If you notice you see the gaps in time ranging from 22 years on up.I believe the reason for this is that the market "can't" cut in half so soon after doing ...

It’s my job to analyze the markets, turn them upside down, inside out, and always consider both sides of the story.

That’s the only way to make informed trading decisions, and to make sure the odds are tipped in your favor as much as possible.

Take the U.S. dollar, for example. There are strong arguments being made from both the bulls and the bears. Today I want to examine both sides, and tell you which one is more convincing based on the current evidence.

Let’s start with …

Why Bulls Say the
U.S. Dollar Has Bottomed

Reason #1. This dollar bear market is about seven years old. What difference does that make? Well, the last two major bear markets in the U.S. dollar lasted … seven years. …

Things work a certain way.

This is our eleventh May at our cabin and one thing we can count on every year is that no matter how warm it might get in April it will get very cold and maybe even snow, like it is today (that picture is from this morning), sometime between May 10th and May 15th.

Invariably someone will make a comment in April about it being warm from there on out and it is always wrong. The cyclicality of this is very reliable.

There is an obvious parallel here with the bear phase of a stock market cycle. There are always feel good rallies in a bear that cause people to think it will be a bull from there on out and it is always wrong.

Of course this could be a first or maybe despite it quacking like a bear it is not, but …