“Now is the accepted time to make your regular annual good resolutions. Next week you can begin paving Hell with them as usual.” ~ Mark Twain
“We will open the book. Its pages are blank. We are going to put words on them ourselves. The book is called Opportunity and its first chapter is New Year’s Day.” ~ Edith Lovejoy Pierce
I’d like to take this opportunity to wish all of my readers a very happy New Year. 2009 was challenging to say the least – clearly it was the best of times and it was the worst of times but if 2009 has taught us anything it’s that there is always an opportunity for the perseverant. We went from the depths of despair in March straight into a 9-month rally of epic proportions. While we may question the wisdom of the underlying fundamentals, we cannot question the evidence of just how resiliant our economy and our people really are and that, if nothing else, gives me great hope for our future.
I myself have gone from being the lone market optimist back in March (see our Year One Review) to being one of the 11% of the remaining pessimists as the market takes back over 50% of it’s losses (I am arguing that it’s less than 50% in my Last Charts of the Decade). Whether we are, as I think, at the apex of a very normal Fibonacci retracement or whether we are at the mid stage of a full recovery back to our 2007 glory remains to be seen but for now, I can re-use the same statement I made to Members when I argued the media was too bearish in March:
“Television is a powerful and emotional medium, it is very difficult to go against the will of ALL these “experts” when they get on TV and all tell you to sell (or buy) and then their TV station backs them up with bearish news and bearish guests – it’s a natural bias that develops, they aren’t going to make their own paid personalities look foolish by contradicting them with facts and dissenting opinions.”
Substitute bullish for bearish and we have my quote of the day for December 31st, 2009. If you do nothing else today in the markets, at least consider the idea of establishing at least some hedges – just in case we open the new year on a down note. On December 9th I wrote an article called…
