Bear Market Investing » bear market

Bear Market Continues to Accelerate

Big Bear — Wed, 08 Oct 2008 13:22:34 +0000

From Philadelphia Inquirer, This bear market not that grisly yet

“To appreciate the speed of the declines in the markets, the Dow ended trading on Sept. 12, just 17 trading days ago, at 11,421.99. That span of time began with Wall Street blueblood Lehman Bros. Holdings Inc., which survived the Depression, filing for bankruptcy.

“The way we’re going,” said David Kovacs, chief investment officer for Turner Investment Partners Inc., of Berwyn, there is a prospect of a mega-bear market “in a few days.”

October is a notoriously difficult month for stocks when the economy is weakening. The crashes of 1929 and 1987 took place in October. There also is uncertainty about the depth and character of a recession forecast for late 2008 and early 2009.”

Brazil’s Bovespa Officially in a Bear Market

Big Bear — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 19:20:12 +0000

Brazil’s Bovespa has joined the US and UK as bear markets. The benchmark has declined 21% since the May high of 73,516.

FTSE Bear Market Imminent

Big Bear — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 17:12:17 +0000

The FTSE 100 is close to joining its US counterparts by being in an “official” bear market. Today’s intraday low of 5,358.50 placed it within 4 points of the 5384 level that defines a bear market. But as the Telegraph points out…

“Technical analysts say that what’s more important is whether or not the market breaches its March 17 closing low of 5414 – which was hit at the time of the Bear Stearns collapse.

If the FTSE 100 closes below 5414 (and stays below for several sessions), the market will be trading at its lowest point since 2005 and chartists say there will be no discernible support level.

That means there is unlikely to be any technical bounce and that a market turnaround will have to be driven by some genuinely significant good news, rather than a sense that “the market is just too cheap at these levels”.

How many more Fed cuts?

Big Bear — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 20:17:00 +0000

So, the fed cut again. The .75 point reduction was less than the full point expected by most of Wall Street.

Personally, I believe the fed will continue to cut until the lending rate is zero, like Japan did in the nineties. Nothing and no one, not even Ben et al., can turn this economy around. From the Associated Press:

There’s a risk in Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke’s bold moves of late.

If recent history is any guide, the euphoria that met the Fed’s three-quarter-point reduction to a key interest rate Tuesday could be short-lived. With a string of urgent and aggressive actions, the Fed itself could end up feeding the panicky mind-set that it so desperately wants to calm.

Two Fed members dissented, preferring a smaller cut, while Bernanke and seven others prevailed with a more powerful three-quarter-point one. Cuts of this size are pretty infrequent. Bernanke, in an emergency session in January, ordered one – making for the single-biggest reduction in more than two decades.