[wardaddy]

Is it just me or does it appear to everyone else that your average FReeper pays little attention to these market threads. It's like many FReepers have an economic/political disconnect.

In my view, this bear capitulation is serious business. I hope we are near the progress of bottoming. This afternoon's close will tell who's got the momentum: the hedge fund shorties and panickers or the buyers. I doubt we'll close any better than 2% down across the major indices.

It's a very odd time. We have a relatively sound economy but an emotive and quite Bearish market. Usually a big Bear like this is accompanied by a poor economy.

[NeoCaveman]

Is it just me or does it appear to everyone else that your average FReeper pays little attention to these market threads. It's like many FReepers have an economic/political disconnect.

Hopefully they are long term and perserving their sanity by not watching this bear market meltdown. It seems too late to sell. No sense crying over the gallons and gallons of spilled milk.

[mwl1]

The biggest worry, in my estimation, is that the RATS and the media are deliberately talking down the economy, so as to provoke a consumer retrenchment and double-dip recession. I did what I could this weekend as a consumer.

[Southack]

"In my view, this bear capitulation is serious business. I hope we are near the progress of bottoming. This afternoon's close will tell who's got the momentum: the hedge fund shorties and panickers or the buyers. I doubt we'll close any better than 2% down across the major indices. It's a very odd time. We have a relatively sound economy but an emotive and quite Bearish market. Usually a big Bear like this is accompanied by a poor economy."

The "disconnect" between the market and our economy is that we still have a pricing bubble left on Wall Street. We've still got triple-digit P/E's on EBAY and AMAT, hardly the stuff that "bottoms" in the market are made from.

The question is whether the massive market price gyrations are going to give us a fast Bear or a slow Bear.

For me, I'd prefer to see all of the pain at once, but it's unlikely to happen that way.

There are simply too many contradictory "signals" for traders to "agree" on the direction of the Market. We've got low inflation, low interest rates, and high productivity on one side indicating "Buy", and we've got outrageous P/E's, accounting fiascos, and corporate fraud all screaming "Sell" on the other side.

Those two forces are colliding forcefully, and this impact is going to toss up a lot of smoke.

The REAL direction of the market won't even be known until we see the size of the 9/11 patriotic rally. In the meantime, we're bound to get a few bad disclosures prior to the August 14 accounting deadline - as corporate CEO's perform world-class CYA operations.

[sibb1213]

We are out here but not much to add to the comments already posted. I'm old enough to know it will come back and you just sit and wait. You youngsters should be buying. My concern is my retirement (which I'm now in) and the effect on the elections in November. The Sheeple get vengeful during elections and they have to blame someone. Many of them will listen to the screaming by the demorats and vote against Republicans. I hope I'm wrong. Market coming back up from its low as we speak!

[RobRoy]

>>Is it just me or does it appear to everyone else that your average FReeper pays little attention to these market Threads. It's like many FReepers have an economic/political disconnect.<< I'm lurking. I worked, in early 2000, for a dot com trying to get to it's ipo. In the few weeks I was their (seven, as a consultant hired literally on a day-to-day basis) I was promoted to the point where I was responsible for everyone doing the page content, design AND ASP coding, and my experience is strictly MAINFRAME programming and project manangement (that's COBOL DB2 and IMS for those of you in west palm beach). The reason I left was that the more I knew about what was going on and what had been accomplished in the year before I arrived, the more I knew they didn't have a clue what they were doing, even though there were some extremely bright people there (one had written books on project management and design). I realised the whole dot com thing was a sham in those seven weeks. Yeah, those of us that thought it was crazy to by Yahoo et al when it first came out were right, eventually. But we didn't anticipate the "tulip bulb" feeding frenzy that would happen first. Some really did make out like bandits. Those days are over, much like the late '20's are over.