This Picture Look Upside Down? It isn't. Actually its a picture of the water. If you look in the upper right hand corner, you can see the white swan that is on land. With the exception of the tree branch in the center, the remainder is in the water, as a reflection of the blue sky, clouds and trees. I love the way the lake changes the landscape. On some days, the texture of the surface is ruffled by the wind and on days like this one, the surface is so smooth it's hard to tell what is real and what is a reflection. Another thing different about the appearance of this post is the type size which I increased as an accommodation to one of my readers who told me it was difficult to read. Hopefully this will help.
Did You Get Out Of The Market Last Year? If you did, you did it against my advice. It's very difficult to stay in a falling market hoping it will get better. A lot of my clients could no longer bear the pain of seeing their assets drop to levels that we had previously thought impossible. If you will read my posts I did warn that the market was vulnerable prior to this drop. While we changed our strategy prior to the drop to reflect our decreased optimism, (We raised more cash and moved away from high P/E stocks) we were still vulnerable and took a hit along with everyone else, although perhaps not as much. What hurt us the most was that some companies in our portfolio with a long track record of increasing dividends cut or eliminated the dividend. Some did this within weeks of announcing that they were totally committed to continuing their dividend policy. There are ways to determine which dividends are most likely to be cut and we will monitor those more closely in the future.
The Market Averages Have Increased By 80% Since March of 2009. If you got out close to that date, you were likely to have cemented in a huge loss. We had several clients who did that. As I have preached for years, there are market forces that prompt you to sell when markets are low and buy when they are high. I will admit that I don't know how to predict the markets well enough to be either 100% in or 100% out at any given time but when everyone says "run for the hills", its probably time to begin buying again. I do not know how much the current market trend will last but I predict that we have another 3-4 months of strong markets. This prediction is based strictly on statistical principals which show that from September to the first of the year, the markets show the strongest increase of any other period.
Having Trouble With Weight Management. I weighed in at 167 again this morning. Despite constant efforts to eat less, I still weigh the same as I did last week. Glucose levels are also about the same. I had to give up and do some occasional injections during the day to keep it down. I am still not giving in totally and will work even harder next week to drop some weight and reduce insulin levels.
No comments:
Post a Comment