Jason Bush in Forbes suggests that Russia's recovery may be buoyant: 'while the Russian government is still cautiously forecasting 2 percent GDP growth in 2010, many independent economists are already predicting growth of as much as 5 percent next year'.  Oleg Deripaska's heavily-indebted RusAl has made a deal to sell 1.68 million tons of aluminum to Chinese state corporation Norinco over seven years.  Renault COO Patrick Pelata has told the press that whilst the French car giant will support bankruptcy-skirting Avtovaz, the company will not supply the cash booster shot that the Russians allegedly want.  Corporate loan portfolios and overdue corporate loans fell slightly in September, as the ruble gained in value.  The Russian Gold Industrialists Union has announced that gold production rose 14.6% in the first nine months of 2009, year-on-year, an increase they attributed to a number ...

By Jeffrey Kennedy

Close to ninety percent of all traders lose money. The remaining ten percent somehow manage to either break even or even turn a profit – and more importantly, do it consistently. How do they do that?

That’s an age-old question. While there is no magic formula, one of Elliott Wave International’s senior instructors Jeffrey Kennedy has identified five fundamental flaws that, in his opinion, stop most traders from being consistently successful. We don’t claim to have found The Holy Grail of trading here, but sometimes a single idea can change a person’s life. Maybe you’ll find one in Jeffrey’s take on trading? We sincerely hope so.

The following is an excerpt from Jeffrey Kennedy’s Trader’s Classroom Collection. For a limited time, Elliott Wave International is offering Jeffrey Kennedy’s report, How to Use Bar Patterns to Spot Trade Setups, free.

Why Do Traders Lose?

If you’ve been trading for a long time, …

The broad sweep in housing-gold ratios is just as broad and as sweeping as both gold bulls and bears might hope…

Even the UK’s small, tightly packed mainland, floating off the edge of Europe, includes disparate and distinct real-estate markets. Glasgow is as different from London as Cornwall from Cheshire. But in the main (and the mania), and with a peak of 185,000 new dwellings under construction in 2006, the broad sweep of house-price inflation…followed by an inevitable slump lasting six years or so…tends to apply across the nation.

In the United States, in contrast, new housing starts at the peak of what pundits, economists and investment bankers clearly felt was a coast-to-coast boom in 2006 approached 1.63 million amid a total housing market of 128 million units spread across 3.5 million square miles.

By necessity, that makes the idea of an “average” home price more slippery. But let’s not let such quibbles

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Key News• Iceland's central bank unexpectedly raised the benchmark interest rate to 18 percent, the highest in at least seven years, after the island reached an aid agreement with the International Monetary Fund. (Bloomberg)• Interbank cost of borrowing funds fell across the board on Tuesday, according to the latest daily fixing from the British Bankers' Association, as the recent turmoil on financial markets eased. (Reuters)• Key Reports Due (WSJ):7:45a.m. ICSC/Goldman Sachs Chain Index For Oct 25: Previous: -1.6%. 8:55a.m. Redbook Retail Sales Index For Oct 25: Previous: -1.1%. 9:00a.m. Aug S&P/Case Shiller Home Price Index: Previous: -17.9%. 10:00a.m. Oct Conference Board Consumer Confidence: Expected: 52. Previous: 59.8. 10:00a.m. Oct Richmond Fed Mfg Survey: Previous: -18. 5:00p.m. ABC/Wash Post Consumer Conf For Oct 26 Previous: 50. Two-day FOMC meeting begins.

Quotable "A good conspiracy is unprovable. I mean, if you can prove it,

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Sometimes it seems like both policymakers and pundits yearn for the halcyon, clear-cut days of the Cold War ... back when foreign policy and morality in trans-Atlantic relations had the ambiguity of a coin toss, and the whole world felt just one accident away from nuclear annihilation. It was a hell of a field day for Hollywood as well, which churned out the doomsday blockbusters with prolific flair. Perhaps it says something about where we are today in U.S.-Russia relations that a movie studio is rushing to do a remake of America's popular 1984 sonnet to the Cold War, Red Dawn - an impossibly patriotic action movie featuring teenagers in a Mid-Western town who mount a mujahideen-like resistance to the unexpected Soviet occupation of their city. David Plotz has a pretty entertaining column about the remake of this trashy B movie (really not comparable ...