**** 1 hour glitch of Oct 26, 98 *****
Trading stopped due to a computer glitch today. Someone was quick to point out the potential impact of another computer-related glitch, y2k.
*******
Almost 8 days of small gains in the DOW after the second rate cut by Greenspan. Earnings (tech sector - IBM, MSFT, Adobe, etc., other fortune 500) are coming out better than expected. Oil sector (a defensive investment) is reporting decreases in earnings. Experts that jumped into oil, utilities, and consumer stocks, fearing recession, must be really disappointed. Why the bear market did not take hold? Cash, sitting on the side lines, is nervously watching the gains and will enter the market after another rate cut before December or when the January effect does not materialize. Greenspan does not want the market to sink, at any cost.
Analysts, in the meanwhile, predicted recession and bear market.
If economists were so smart they would all be rich by now. Example - the notorious Long Term Capital Fund that lost 100's of billions of dollars used a strategy developed by two Nobel Prize winning economists. These guys used their gambling-casino approach (investing in the derivatives, on the basis of calculated probabilities, Re.: the Russian market, without enough historical data to back up their calculation?). It did not work. Instead, they blame it on the Asian flu as if all of the problems were originated by Asians. Some of these banks and currency speculators dumped the "gambling money" in real estate in some Asian countries and got the local governments all excited (with the associated corruption tendencies). Asian countries are now trying to fix their problems, in their own ways. Singapore, Korea, Taiwan, Thailand, and Hong Kong will come out of it with better systems. We have not heard what they are doing about the y2k problem. Some random opinions aka trash talk. Ram
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