Expand your knowledge

Know your Federal Reserve Chairman - An interesting piece on Ben Bernanke's track toward the long awaited job.

Brett Steenberger share his favorite posts for 2007

Excellent blog by John Forman of The Essential of Trading about how to take the long view when trading

According to The Institutional Investor it seems everyone, including the big players had their share in the last market turmoil.

Trader's Narrative believe we are in the beginning of our way up, back on the trend's back.

Barry Ritholtzl post in "TheStreet" reveal What Investors Need to Know About Historical Data.

Expand your knowledge

• Investors begin to see the light at market bottom.
• Daily Option Report tries to figure why the VIX isn't moving with the market.
• Debris from the subprime blast exposed in the form of $100 Billion writedowns.
• Intra day and stock picks blog

Open positions for January 20th

As the market goes through a healthy cleaning process the system act as expected and positions getting closed one after the other. Since the beginning of the month, 7 stocks out of the 13 stocks which I had in my portfolio have been closed. The portfolio has suffered a drawdown of 14% during that period.

In these periods I find it helpful to read any information talking about periods like the one we're now experiencing. I find that there is a common ground with all the books/blogs and it is to stay focus and remember to look at longer time frames than the current day, week or even month. As history repeat itself, even when discussing the financial markets, periods like this happened before and at the end of them the market returned to its natural direction.

As I mentioned in my previous post, we might already hit market bottom but a confirmation for this will only be available in the following week or two.

Here is the status of my current holdings:

Symbol	Entry Date	Entry Price	Current Price	Profit %
ARTG	24/09/2007	3.00	3.72	24.33
IDEV	24/09/2007	6.62	6.80	2.72
INFA	28/09/2007	15.72	15.94	1.40
LWSN	16/10/2007	10.15	9.46	-6.80
ANDW	19/10/2007	14.36	15.04	4.74
AMSG	26/10/2007	26.68	27.24	2.10
SDIX	13/11/2007	5.24	4.75	-9.28
CTGX	26/11/2007	4.93	4.95	0.41

Technorati Tags: Computerized System,Stock Market,Weekly status,Nasdaq

Bulls, start your engine

Looking at the chart taken from Fusion IQ we can see that currently, only 20% of the NYSE stocks trade above their 200 MA.

Historically speaking, it usually signaled the end of the bear period and was a sign for the bulls to begin their buying spree.

So, can us bulls warm up our engines?

Technorati Tags: Stock Market,NYSE,Bear,Bullish

Expand your knowledge

• Results of a study shows the important of self esteem with relation to the achievements one may have in his life.
• Stay true to your beliefs and don't sell your soul - Brett Steenbarger confesses his dilemmas.
• TraderFeed on turning setbacks into goals
• Trader's Narrative waits for seasonality to kick in
• Kevin explains what reverse divergence is.
• Barry Ritholtz from "The Big Picture" has a different view on Q3's GDP=4.9%

Reminiscences from a recession

Reading Paul B. Farrell column on MarketWatch and the comments that followed brought up some memories from the last years here in Israel.

It seems most people fear recession and its consequences. As someone who lives in a country which just came out of a rough period caused by a recession I can understand and relate to some of the emotions arise upon hearing the word "recession". As you might have guessed, I live in Israel. I work in the High Tech sector now and have been working as a developer in one of the public universities during the beginning of the recession period.

Following the Intifada back in 2000 (war between Israel and the Palestinians), economic growth had fallen from 8% in 2000 to 0% in 2001. Three years later, on 2004 following a deep recession, the government decided to execute a health plan. Among the steps which has been taken:

• Cutting monthly salary by 5% for all public workers (myself included) for a period of 2 years. This act was called "Economy encouragement wage".
• Raising the VAT for a period of one year.
• Budget cut for all public offices.
• Job cut in all public offices including government offices, universities, local council...
• Cutting health care allowance.
• Cutting national insurance allowance.
• Major cut in the security budget which you may not know, but here in Israel, due to the regular tension between Israel and its surrounding neighbors, security budget relative to western countries is big.

The predictions of the ministry of finance office talked about a rough period of three to four years which in the end will get us out of the recession and improve the financial state of all sectors.

Those years weren't easy for me and my family. I have lost my job as more than 15% of the working population had. Luckily I was able to find a new job soon enough but there were lot of people which were unemployed for a period longer than a year. A lot of families found themselves under the poverty line and organization who aim to help those in needs sprout all over the country. Many factories and companies were bankrupt and things didn't look too promising.

Looking back, these weren't happy days but I believe they were necessary to bring us to where we are today with an economic growth of 6.6% only after three years.

It's a painful process but at the end of it lies a brighter future for all. I believe recession is cyclical in western economic societies and thus inevitable. All you can do is plan ahead for these times.