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Strategies & Market Trends : Options -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Jill who wrote (4669)	3/12/2000 9:21:00 AM
From: Poet	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 8096

Jill, Polvie (hi there my friend) and thread: Here are some thots from today's Option Investor Newsletter: Having totally gone off the deep end and rambled for several paragraphs I will try and direct your focus back to what is important next week. Economic reports and lots of them, followed by a Fed meeting. Sounds like a great week to go fishing. Tuesday starts off the calendar with Retail Sales, Wednesday Business Inventories, Import/Export Prices, Industrial Production. Thursday Jobless Claims, PPI, Housing Starts, Building permits. Friday closes with the CPI. Could be a rough week. Follow all those probably negative economic reports with a dose of interest rate fears and a Fed meeting on Tuesday the 21st and you get a real Maalox moment. The optimistic side of me is saying, "Dow down -438 points" got to be some bargains here somewhere. The pessimistic side is thinking, "I would not buy PG, JNJ, DD, EK, KO, so why should anybody else". Like I said last Sunday there is still a Nasdaq correction lurking in our future and even though it felt bad on Wednesday it was only a blip on the chart so the "big one" is still in our future. It would be nice if we could get through April earnings before we get blindsided by the next trip to the woodshed but April 15th is still a long way off. I would be careful of any Nasdaq weakness next week. With the market (Dow) still in a down trend you never know when the Nasdaq bottom may fall out. The VIX has been easing down from its high of almost 29 on Wednesday. Friday it moved in a narrow range between 23.45 and 25 and finished almost unchanged for the day at 24.17. It is not giving us any signals, buy or sell, at the present. The put/call ratio however is only .39 and indicating some weakness ahead. Friday night almost all the other editors and writers in the office happened to congregate in one spot where a lively discussion on market direction ensued. Without exception we all believed that the market could and would go down next week. All the negatives both technical and sentiment were being tossed out like so many nails for the Dow coffin. Red Alert! As I pondered the implications for this article Kimo and I slowly came to the realization that everyone had built the perfect wall of worry for the market to climb. Just like I have repeated many times, "when everything looks too good to be true, it probably is" the reverse is also true, "It is always darkest before the dawn". While I believe it could get darker, 9500 would be really dark, there is another axiom that comes to mind, "the herd is always wrong at both ends". If the herd here thinks the market is going down next week does that mean we should take the contrarian view and bet against it? Absolutely not! Never fight the trend. Take all the information you can find from every source possible and then plan for each outcome, up and down. If you pre-plan for both then you will be ready to execute for each direction. Once prepared, sit back and watch the show. Be slow to react at the open and you will save yourself much grief.

To: Jill who wrote (4669)	3/12/2000 2:55:00 PM
From: elpolvo	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 8096

jillster- what are you trying to do? open up a whole box of pandoras? re: financial security and financial freedom freedom and security are mutually exclusive. you can't have both. pick one, dear, and... be happy. :-) knowing your wisdom, i think you'll make the right choice. yer fren, -polvie