...the flush

The headlines will be rampant tonight, tomorrow morning and into the long weekend.  We'll save the 10mth lows, 17th month lows speak.  What has happened in about 2 weeks of trading in 2008?.  How important is capital preservation?.  Let's see just a replay of 2008 so far!.  A full 11 trading days of it that has literally blown almost 11mths of market gains.    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WofFb_eOxxA

The purpose of our site was and is to provide commentary, methodology of doing and being in a trade(s) , the market.  Sometime in the early stages we started tossing email alerts-comments as an addition.  Some took this too far and blindly chased without doing any homework, but with the market firing on all cylinders it was easy to just jump on a train and rob it nicely.   Maybe fortunately, it is this group of so called traders that have been slowly getting removed from this market.  These are the first to crumble.  The plumbers have gone back to concentrating on plumbing, the teachers to teaching, the housewives back to 'wifing just like in those post bubble days.   Unbelievably, we've gotten a few complaints about not giving alerts on stocks in the past month or so!.  Sorry, but whose butt are we supposed to pull them out of in this crazy market?.  Besides, we weren't built on this.   We have a track record of 5 years or so in the online underground trading world, we've done the grunt work and were on the 'growth' train from the beginning and sometimes from the first minute on a DXPE, BTJ...BOOM...and so on and so on.    Well...times have changed!!   

You see the same subprime mess, ECO numbers as we do and the time has come to things differently, maybe.    One of them has always been the possibility of going into cash, capital preservation.  This is nothing new to our strategy, we've done it plenty of times before.  It's always been around but it's never been more important than these past few months and even more the past few days of horrible losses on the indices.  Hopefully, we've saved you a buck or two this week by sitting quietly.   This doing nothing is tremendously difficult for anyone doing this trading jig full-time as they always put candy in front of you and you get sucked into a play or two.   Why do you think we have so many false moves intraday, even the the biggest technical shorts are waiting for a rally and are dipping in as we see on so many blogs day after day .   Does this mean we needed or need to change to a Bear, a short sale idea site?.    Absolutely not!.   All you really ever needed was the Journal the way it is, our commentary offered many plays we didn't like any more and said why.  That's a short if there ever was one from us.  When were we off the Shippers and let you know, as one example?.  October? November?.   We know a few of you just short whatever stock and /or sec we stop discussing and following on the Journal.   That's cool with us and actually quite smart..lol   Too bad its always been hard to find shares to short for many of our plays or we'd been at it for years now.   Recently, we've talked about the fear the AG'sChem shoe was yet to fall.    We had day 1 on Wednesday, glimpses of it before on MOS's earnings day and before Thursday's open said a day 2 in a row was very possible.  One look around the losers list Thursday and you see TNH POT MOS MON etc. doing another 10% plus down days.  We've talked about panic setting in, something we want to wash this market out with.  We noted some of these stocks were great to set this panic off as they were expensive, widely institutionally held stocks related to something we all can understand and that is commodities and everything that encompasses it.   This doesn't mean we were making bushels off this commodity sale the past two days, it just shows the idea, potential lead was there for you and us to use.  We simply don't short for numerous reasons, the big one is we never needed to.   Thursday.. we finally got some panic, market volatility with the VIX spiking.  Will that continue into Friday?.  Probably not.    Despite the lower and lower market so far in '08, we have not seen this fear gauge move until today.  We may finally be on the cusp of what we need to bottom.   Say for a second that we are almost there, maybe we even start to bounce if there is some 'stimulus' and something to go with it ...maybe even the reports from multinationals GE-IBM will give a boost and short covering into the long weekend.  This will curb the VIX for now and give us a green day.  Not exactly what we wanted as of the close Thursday.

What would have been the point of turning this site into a 'short fest' of ideas and then switch back to what we do best sooner than later?.    Simply, if you wanted short ideas there were plenty, it is all in how you work and interpret the Journal.   The premise behind the Journal was to show how we think as traders, there was enuff to pick out to short if you wanted to play that way if sitting on cash is not for you.   Now...if this market bloodletting continues much longer, we have discussed and are open to changes we would make to deal with the changing and challenging environment..a Bear market.  For ourselves and therefore the site.   Until that day or until we are certain of a bottom to rally off for more than a few hours..we will promote cash is king.  We don't want any Gizmos' cats as members.   Let's just be ready to pounce with money in tow....