"There is only one side of the market and it isn't the bull-side or the bear-side but the right side"--Jesse Livermore, Legendary Stock Market Trader
We want to thank Investopedia.com and Jack Guinan for the Livermore quote and the hilarious cartoon above. Many have been brainwashed to believe that "...for higher [stock market] returns" we need to take more risk. Nothing could be further from the truth. For more profitable returns on our investments we need to be on the "right side" of the market's direction and on the right side of those who control the market's direction.
Right now it seems obvious that the "powers-that-be" want the stock market and commodity markets to go higher and higher. They tout the concept that the "worst is over" and that everything from housing to productivity is getting better and better.
The truth is, the best way to "sell high" and to "buy cheap" is to understand how the markets are manipulated through the drama and distractions of "The Economic Crisis" of the day. This economic downturn has been hyped to the hilt, and it's been exploited for all that it is worth. Now the "hypers" are pushing the idea that things are better and we can be "guardedly optimistic".
"Increasingly, it seems, we are not alone in our steady pessimism about how long it will take for this crisis be resolved. Bud Conrad, chief economist of this operation [Casey Research], sent over the annual report from the Bank for International Settlements today, along with a snippet summing up their view of the outlook for the economy. Here’s that snippet…
So far, the crisis has developed in five more or less distinct stages of varying intensity, starting with the subprime mortgage-related turmoil between June 2007 and mid-March 2008 (Graph II.1). Following this first stage, during which the primary focus was on funding liquidity, bank losses and writedowns continued to accumulate as the cyclical deterioration slowly translated into renewed asset price weakness. As a result, in the second stage of the crisis, from March to mid-September 2008, funding problems morphed into concerns about solvency, giving rise to the risk of outright bank failures. One such failure, the demise of Lehman Brothers on 15 September, triggered the third and most intense stage of the crisis: a global loss of confidence, arrested only after unprecedented and broad-based policy intervention. Stage four, from late October 2008 to mid-March 2009, saw markets adjust to an increasingly gloomy global growth outlook amid uncertainties over the effects of ongoing government intervention in markets and the economy.
