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If you favorite baseball team pitcher gave up back to Back to BACK dingers, what would the manager do?. Chances are big, he could not watch the horror show anymore and pull the gopher ball pitcher out and send him to the showers!.   In reality, it's not much different with stocks.  How much can you stand before the pain threshold becomes unbearable?.   When do you become the true manager of your team, your portfolio and start pulling some strings to avoid further damage?  Today was as a good start.  Also, if you were thinking of buying today after the morning reversal down....unfortunately, by this time you are bringing in a mop up guy who really you have no confidence in or else he wouldn't be your mop up guy!.   Simply this relates as to why look for another stock to buy in the mid -innings/ intraday in a market like this, the mop up guy might be fresh from sitting on his butt, just like a stock that is up big all of a sudden... but how much does he have left in 'em before all want to cash in, especially those just waiting to dump the gift in a bad market?.   We're not planning to put new money to use.  We don't see the point of looking into buying fresh meat in this type of environment unless we are going to flip the daylights out of the stock.   In that case we/ you better be at the beginning of the run and not going in after a stock is up 9 pts like a UHAL.   What we have now is an environment where we will swing the daylights out of stocks on news or EPS or whatever that day.   These will be the short lived plays until this all subsides.   After a few days of negative markets, today was the day nobody cared what your name was.   There was no 'Cheers' about it.    The domino effect we've talked about was in full bloom as DJIM stocks finally took their lumps with the rest of the market.

Today was actually ugly,  if you want to get into how small we all are!.  Actually quite disgusting if you want the truth.  After 2 days where late dip buying showed there was ready money again, today came a different twist when the market proceeded to bounce strong.  This was a definite possibility for the afternoon considering the past 2 days and considering todays already exaggerated drop... we were waiting for a bounce rally of sorts.  It was the close that really mattered to us..   If the buyers didn't come we thought, then we'd blow off this market by the close.   Instead, it rallied strong until Maria B and the CNBC crew decided to bust out the Gross interview from his site as the last kick today to the overbought market.   Nice timing eh?.    Just when the market was making an impressive run, this comes on?.  Come on!.   This was so orchestrated that it stinks !.   Oh, we're all so small!.    The only thing you can do today is cover yourself before if it possibly gets out of hand.   For some this might be the only way to go.  If you are holding just a few positions, you were probably selling them off today or have enough confidence in a few to continue and make it a longer term hold.    If you are holding a sizeable portfolio, all you could do is dwindle the dollars invested down.   Ideally, you don't want to drop 100% to no positions and all cash, but you do want to make it manageable from here while reducing the risk of margin and or being close to 100% invested.  You need the weekend to at least evaluate and also to see tomorrow's reaction instead of acting hastily and going all cash.   Honestly, as bad as it looks after today (you never want to finish at the lows), we all need to take a chill pill and evaluate our books before drastic conclusions.  In a perfect market world some firm(s), or some big talking heads will come out in the days ahead and put Gross and his comrades into the woodshed with a rosy picture.  We nominate Paulson for the gig or his boy, Bernanke. 

If you really think about it, the overseas fear here and everywhere of the Shanghai, then the UK hike (even if expected) precipitated all of the action on this continent the 2 last days.  An excuse was all that was needed to bring our bond yields, rates on the fast rise to the surface. Guess, it pays to read the subtitles carefully.

Hey...Paris got out after 3 days in the can, maybe we can get out before the weekend too....but our names ain't Hilton