The WSJ change emphasizing how much WORSE things now are just happened to occur at the same time a Democrat took over from a Republican in the White House.

What are the chances? … naw, that’s just crazy thinking.

Must have been that ‘modest proposal’.

Stampede! Some sleepy bulls may be just about heading out of the stockade here.

@ben22 i own UNG, the seasonal trends favor nat gas in Q2 and then there is stimulus, $ decline and clean energy trend, so what’s not to like? Buy any dip below $19.

Don’t really love the stock but picked some up after the earnings announcement and job cuts, they shot down real quick and I bought at exactly $30.

that was fun.

@lb

When you say gas do you have nat gas at all? I played with XTO and CHK last year as well as some EP, I made some then lost some and ended up about flat on those trades. I haven’t really gone back into those much but maybe they are worth taking a look at? The futures contracts for nat gas are fairly high out to Dec. but nat gas had run up so much I’m not sure about it.

I was buying FXI in November along with my hard asset strategy.

I’m not buying the doom and gloom talk so much coming out of China and unlike us they already got a big infrastructure bill passed. Now all the bears can hit me with some stats.

I don’t own the Brazil etf, (EWZ?) but they have had a good start to the year.

Seems to me when looking at future growth prospects of us and them that the Chinese/Brazilian markets have really taken a big pounding and I’d rather be long than short if I had a time horizon of more than 3 years.

For what it’s worth, I traded around with FXP last year but that was one of the ultrashorts that got taken out by volatility and had a hard time providing that inverse over a stretch. I think you’d be better of shorting China differet ways.

For example, when the tech cycle ends, if BIDU has run up you could have a short position there as the multiple on a stock like that might still need to contract quite a bit before this is all over. Might be an easy way to make a good profit if we do indeed get a quick bounce into the spring.

I hate all banks and wouldn’t invest a dime of my fake paper money in any of them, for a trade or not I’d rather just be elsewhere.

also, look at KBR–the regional bank ETF–none have TARP– up smartly. [agree we retest the lows, but in the immortal words of the guy in Gladiator "Not yet; just not quite yet"]

Based on valuations (forward-looking PE), the markets are ridiculously frothy here, but I guess I could see things heading back toward the previous highs — certainly above 10K on the DJIA and upwards of 2K on the NASDAQ — if every time we get another month where between 500K and 600K people stop contributing to the economy and the government bailout bonanza gets cranked up another notch. Meanwhile, the global economy gets smaller and smaller. When the music stops a lot of people/companies/countries are not going to have a chair.

‘Cause I don’t see unemployment slowing down even a little bit between now and summer — maybe not between now and year-end. Wouldn’t want to be a college grad in May looking for work. Would like even less to be a 50-something unemployed person looking for work, with an under water mortgage and kids in college.

Amazing how everyone (apparently) believes that all we require is a sufficiently large stimulus, as if a 3-day dead corpse could be brought back to life if only it were struck by a sufficiently large bolt of lightning.

What if it turns out that the root cause of our trouble is too much debt? Will borrowing trillions for non-productive stimulus packages or bonuses for finance crooks help or hurt things?

And how long until this irrational exuberance dissipates and we come to realize that we’ve only made things (which were already incredibly horrible) worse? 2 months? 6 months? 24 months?