One Year All Ready - but not in a good way

Well okay, this isn't a wedding anniversary - it's one year to the day that the stock market was at it's all time high, the Dow market topped out exactly one year ago today, at 14,164 on October 9, 2007. Today the Dow fell to 8,579 crashing through the 9,000 level for the first time in five years.

This is a historic run of declines, let's look at the facts:

• The Dow suffered a triple-digit loss for the sixth day in a row, a first, and the average dropped for the seventh day in a row, a losing streak not seen since 2002.
• That's a 5585 point decline or a 39.5% drop
• The average is down 2,338 points, or 21 percent, in the last four weeks, since the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy escalated a long-running credit crunch into a full-fledged crisis
• Of the last 19 trading days, there have been 11 triple-digit losses — including the unprecedented six straight. The six gains have all been triple-digits, and only one of them was enough to make up the losses of the day before.
• The Dow now stands only about 1,300 points above its lowest close of the bear market that followed 9/11. In a market as volatile as this, that gap can be closed in a couple of trading days, or less.
• In percentage terms, the drop in the Dow exceeded the day the markets reopened after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. It was not close to the 22.6-percent decline on Black Monday in 1987, the last stock market crash. (TIM PARADIS and MARTIN CRUTSINGER)
• Most of the world's markets are down even more than the Dow

$872 billion of investments evaporated today, and paper losses for the year add up to an staggering $8.3 trillion or that's what the media wants you to believe. They are not paper loses, but real, and it didn't disappear or 'evaporate' - it changed hands. The markets are a zero sum game. For some one to win, someone needs to loose. To loose means someone else wins.

Who's winning now when you the 'buy and hold' public is loosing their retirement fund? Technical traders on the Street taking the back side of the falling market. As you can see it's a huge amount of money to make in a short time. There's no point in being mad or upset with them - they fulfill a need, it's what makes it a free market.

Listen folks, the buy and hold bull market of the 90's is over - we've lost the last 5 years of gains in the past year. We could easily see a decade of no returns like 1968-82. Now is not the time to be a 'buy and hold' investor - but now is not the time to sell either. The truth is that Wall Street wants you to believe in 'buy and hold'. They need the other side to trade against. They prey on you - the buyers of mutual funds to line their pockets.

There are so many products in the markets that can benefit the individual investor, but are kept hush, hush and not brought to people's attention.

If you'd like to learn more, drop me a line - I'd love to help you out.

Cheers,