you should buy some Toll brothers TOL or Pulte homes PHM stocks right now !

The dow passing 13,000 is more psychological than anything else. It's representative of only 30 major blue chips. While it has correlation to the economy as a whole, it isn't everything. A much better bellweather is the S&P 500, which still hasn't reached a new high since the one it had in 2000.

I would invest in LED / semiconductor technologies

dow climbs 233 after fed rate cut, finishes at 13,079.08

losing thousands in the stock market, i lost the money i was going to use for a downpayment. that's how it works.

what do you mean, fogey? i'm not touching anything

yeah, but it can go in the opposite direction, too, so you can lose everything in a blink of an eye.

I think profit taking is great, but statistically trading is a losing game (it's all just gambling).

I also think Cramer is great and very educational, just be careful how much you take literally - he said to sell Oracle about 6-8 months ago and it's up almost 100% since then (actually past the 2000 highs! WooHoo!!)

I do watch, though, and find the show highly educational (and entertaining).

that IS my fun account, I haven't even looked at my IRAs or 401ks yet. I've made maybe $1000k in a day, and that feels pretty good. I don't think I'm savvy enough for trading yet. So you buy and sell on a daily or weekly basis? Sounds scary. I don't have any individual stocks, just funds. Sounds like you should be jumping on the precious metals bandwagon, seems that's where it is at, fogey.

shoot. $1000, not 1000k. did it that in an earlier post.

i remember two weeks ago, at a similar thread someone said is time to buy cheap stock now, wonder if he is still alive now.

I hear ya. I am about to start doing the same (finally got that "disposable" income thing after more solid investments for the long term - ira, sep). It's all about discipline. If you can make a target price (like Cramer says with his "take 50% off when things hit 100% increase" or something like that), it's when you get caught up in the hype that you get killed (I know this from 2000 bubble) and want to make another 100%.

I am not sure if you are doing really, really well if you are matching your salary or if you have a really, really low salary ;-) ! Eitherway, that is amazing. I'd be quite happy if I could make another 5-10% (over regular market investments - 15-20% per year), after capital gains.

So do you have anything in "safe" investments - bonds, real estate, etc., or just the stock market? Diversified?

OldFogey, can you please be my personal investor? Thanks.

Looks like there may be a bit of a selloff on wall st. this morn, it had dropped below 12000 a little while ago.

DJIA

Recession here we come! Global markets are sliding all over the place today and the Fed just passed an emergency interest rate cut.

Dow's gonna hit 11500 soon. Glad I put in my stop orders...wish I had sold last month.

Look at the 'Inverse Short Funds'.

For you 'kids' graduating - here's a tip from an old guy - go to Dubai, Singapore,CEEMEA, the Caribbean, or any place that's tough to do a large scale construction project - those are the new Las Vegaii.

my fear is the selloffs in asia are going to spark a major selloff here, I hope it doesn't fall too hard today.

as of right now, you could have made some money buying at the opening bell and selling now.

went from down 400+ to down ~150 in a little over an hour. I'm no expert but it looks like a bumpy ride for the next few months.

who wants to bet on whether or not Ben B. still has a job at the end of the year?

i wouldn't be suprised if he has his bets hedged against the market. He probably had all his stock transfered into bonds or something else back when the subprime mortgage crisis just began to surface.

Ben B. is a clueless bozo ... simply doing the bidding of his Republican masters to shore them up before the election.

its just another day - these things happen.

The parralles to the early 70's are starteling. Oil price preasure, growing forign competition, minor inflation and flatlining stock market from the highs of the late 60's. The Nixon camp over reacted to the economic slowdown by cutting, cutting cutting intrest rates util it unleashed a monster tidal wave of inflation that took 10 years to get out of.

Beware of Fed chiefs like Bernake - the market needs to be punished. Its better to swallow a little pull back in the short term than dig a big hole later. Assholes. I have this fear Im gonna spend my middle age decades wallowing in a stagnent econmy while paying 50% taxes so the old people who never saved can have retirement benifits.

what i never quite understand about the market is how a crisis in say, the mortgage or tech sector just bleeds over into all the other sectors so easily. I guess that's because everything ultimately is consumer driven so slowdown in one sector means layoffs/paycuts which means less consumer spending and investment which hits other sectors.

In the end, it ain't 'bout Uncle Ben. Bet he shaves the beard, before things git really wierd.....

It's actually about the fact that we Americans have gotten so far ahead of ourselves in terms of debt, global self-importance & arrogance. Those things mean more than anythiong that the FED does.

My advice: either pay off those credit cards, or use them to buy lots of booze - the good stuff, you know, like '51', or 'Bairrero Velho'...they make Caiiii-purina...hic...hic.....it's all MLK & BliBberty YelL's fault....

So, should I go ahead and refinance my house now?

2 factors - one is slowing of the economy, a natural cycle that folks are overecting to

The other is structured debt financing - wall street firms buying billions of dollars of tranches or mortage risk packages betting on a certain value than using this recievable as an asset to leverage more mergers and buyouts. The exact same thing they did in the 80's with junk bonds, only now its junk mortages bundled into big debt balls. So wall street got burned - the last thing we should do is bail them out. These cocksuckers do this every 10 years and get bailed out. Its unatutral. My bro works for a very conservative investment bank in Chicago, there in the bracket below JP Morgan, Merril Lynch etc., and they hate the fact that if they acted so irresponsibly they'd be out of business, yet the bulge bracket firms of wall street literally get away with robbery.

LB - great time to refi

Banks are desperate for the refi fees

evilp: "I have this fear Im gonna spend my middle age decades wallowing in a stagnent econmy while paying 50% taxes so the old people who never saved can have retirement benifits."

Easy on the old folks, there killer:

Since 1980 the annual rate of U.S. net national saving (net national output less private consumption expenditures less government consumption expenditures, all divided by net national product) has averaged only 4.2 percent. This saving rate is 60 percent smaller than the rate observed between 1950 and 1979!. Since 1986 the United States has saved less than 3 percent of its net output. The saving rate in 1992 was only 2.8 percent.

Not at all sure it's the old folks who are the main problem when it comes to savings rates.

Oh, its the youngbloods for sure blue, but what the hell happens when those kids get old? These same kids who bought into subprime mortgages.

by old I mean i ment those boomers working during their peak productivity years between 86-06. My grandparents saved and lived quite well in retirement. But they also lived and raised kids in a 1600s.ft house and didnt need a BMW and yearly trips to Cancun.

I'm 20 something myself, but at least I put $200 a month into a CoD account, for "in case shit".

Specifically when the tax man comes knocking.

Blue, it is the Old folks - them happy-go-lucky Baby Boomers started living off of personal debt, forst to buy Toytoas, then Lexus-es, then vacation timeshares in Branson.

After the recent credit crunch & wave of foreclosures, expect new European neighbors in branson...well, maybe Miami, or Vegas.

Anyway, I think I saw that our savings rate is negative now. Heh heh - the New Repo Man's gonna be lookin' kinda Chinese. I wonder if we go to war in the next couple of decades 'cause we don't wanna pay our bills.

Im 30 - Ive worked for 10 years in architecture and can barely cling to any semblance of middle class. If I got married, I coulndt afford even one kid. I've never a bought a car and couldnt if had to. Stock market? Yeah right. And guess what, I got a 10% bonus and 5% raise and it still is barely anything to build on. Something fundementaly has shifted in the last fifteen years. I wish I knew what.

i've become convinced that, yes, the boomers are gonna bleed us dry.

gimme my social security check back, i want to put it somewhere useful like the Chinese Economy!

I cant say the boomers are all bad - my folks let me live rent free in my early 20's after college so I could save enough for a downpayment on a condo. But theyre also the ones who warned me that, "your generation will never catch up"

very small condo

i think we'll catch up, we just have to understand that we can't retire at 65 like our parents, and we'll have to learn to save up for the late years early and take our futures into our own hands rather than relying on the welfare state for everything.

Its going to be a long lag time. Think about how well you had it in the 80's and 90's as a kid. Now imagine trying to pay for that same lifestyle for your kids? Could you even come close? Maybe the difference is my parents were NOT in architecture and this whole point is moot.

Apu- the Asian markets aren't doing too good at the moment either.

Can someone explain the rationality behind lowering the interest rares? How is this going to help, seriously? Perhaps I've simplified things a bit too much but aren't we just digging ourselves deeper and deeper into the whole the more we borrow? Economics was never my strong subject in school.

Apurimac: That dough's already been spent on noodles or concrete in Shanghai years ago.

I think the Asian markets are markedly safer than ours, even though they are all linked.

evilp: I could not provide the kind of lifestyle I had as a kid if I were a single parent, however, if I married someone earning an income similar to mine I think I could get much closer to doing so. since my parents for the majority of my childhood were a dual income household, I think that's the key comparison. it's amazing what roughly doubling your household income can do.

Remember, Asia is pretty well tied to our spending habits.

Does anybody invest by dollar cost averaging? I've got some I want to put in, and trying to predict the bottom just seems like a fools errand. dollar cost over the next year would be easier, that's for sure.

Tunamelt; You raised a good question. When the FED manipulates interest rates, it does so primarily for symbolic reasons.

It could be said that the FED is trying to stimulate borrowing & spending when they lower rates. Conversely, if too much growth is occurring, the FED ostensibly raises rates to keep inflation at bay. That is what Alan Greenspan was doing throughout the '90s, pretty successfully (but I'll let the real FED-heads debate that).

Really, though, it is the FED, Foreign Investment, Markets, Consumers & prob'ly a thousand other factors that cause the Economy to expand & contract - many contend that it's a cycle. Some cycles last longer than others.

regarding the last few months of rate cuts - It ain't worked because the Markets (Dow, Nasdaq, FTSE, & all the rest of the World) smell a rat. That rat = Too much consumer debt, negative savings rate & not enough sustainability in the USA Economy. In other words - We're gonna be in A recession & it might be a long one considering that we're debt-junkies who can't really pay our bills.

That's my Simplified, simplistic 2 cents.

Oh TW, to make our future, as Americans, seem even bleeker - we should all remember that the USA is 'greying'. Yup, we're quickly turning into a nation of retirees...w/ no retirement savings.

I really don't like to think of other implications like: the struggle between paying for Senior medical care vs. Educating the young. Or, even more comprehensive: Will the Older generation have enough energy to keep up with the rest of the World, which is generally a younger demographic.

Get Out while you can...& I'm an optimist. Where'd I put that Caipar....

I meant to write:
"Oh BTW, to...."

Weve been in recession for the better part of '07 I think.

Thanks MM that's how I've always understood it too, but as I'm no expert in this field I thought I was way off base.

For whatever reason my brain keeps on seeing some the parallels of our present day economic situation and the one of the 1920s. I'm not saying we're as bad off as we were then but I also don't understand how we seem to have forgotten all the mistakes that were made during that era. That's my WAY oversimplified two cents. Good thing some one's an optimist, all this crap with the mortgage crisis and the troubles the banks are having is making me nervous.

As a "boomer" I guess I resent some of the posts above -- not because they're not, to a degree, true but because they're clearly not universal in applicability.

I've never had debt beyond my mortgage (now nearly paid off), I've raised and educated two children, I've started two different companies and provide employment for a considerable number of people. I've made decent provisions for my own retirement and, along the way, I've made HUGE contributions to the social security system. I've never owned a Lexus or a second home --- and probably never will. I've invested for the future and toed the line on consumption. Yes -- I'm boring as hell ! And, I'm more common than you'd suspect.

To be sure, many (probably too many) of my generation have lived different lives. Much of the abuses arose, in my estimation, from an excessive reliance on an entitlement system in this country that has its roots in the post-depression period and that took hold, with a vengeance, during the late 60s and early 70s.

That entitlement system came from a political system that was, for many, many years, almost totally broken. We've now moved to a political system that is broken in the opposite direction. The pendulum will swing back to the middle -- and not a moment too soon.

I'll back up a bit on the Baby-Boomer rhetoric. However, we can't ignore the aging of our nation & the many who are not prepared for it.

In all honesty quizzical I always saw the whole rise in using credit to buy things as more of a Generation X thing. They saw all that their parents (the boomers) had and no doubtedly worked hard for, as you and my parents did and felt as though they were entitled to have nice stuff RIGHT NOW; not when they could afford it. Gotta love those Reaganomics.