The Wild Market Moves Continue
Oct 29, 2008
Posted by Jody Eisenman | Filed under crisis
As has been happening for the past 2 months, the market continues to trade wildly, thus continuing to reinforce my opinion that long term trading doesn’t make any financial sense anymore. Therefore, if you are going to invest funds in anything today, one must either keep a close watch on your portfolio, or rely on someone you trust to do it for you. There has never been any time in US financial history where the market has had moves of several percentage points per day. Thus, attempting to simply “buy and hold” seems to me to be a rather risky strategy.
Yesterday, the market was up over 10%. What this means to today’s action is probably zero. So far every major rally has had no follow through at all the next day. We could be up or down several hundred points. In fact, even looking at the market at midday is not really a good indication. Most of the market’s volatility seems to come in the last hour of trading.
It looks like Obama is going to win the Presidential election next week. While no one can be quite sure what his economic policies will be, I don’t think either he or McCain really has a firm grasp on the world financial situation. Why do I say this? Because each candidate speaks of all these wonderful programs they are going to implement if elected. We are now facing, by far, the biggest deficit in history. How exactly are they going to pay for these programs? Raise taxes in an economy where people are already suffering? Many Americans are suffering through job losses, housing prices (home foreclosures are now at record levels) and the severe declines in their personal and pension accounts. I believe that we are probably going into a very difficult economic climate going forward. I will speak more about this later today.
