Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Strategies & Market Trends : Z Best Place to Talk Stocks -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: E.J. Neitz Jr who wrote (34633)	11/14/2001 10:39:02 AM
From: pz	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 53068

POSTED AT 7:20 AM EST Wednesday, November 14 By MARK MULLINS Main Event. A good market rule of thumb is to always assume that where there is smoke, there is fire. Remember Bre-X? Remember that tiny news item noting that a certain chief Bre-X geologist had mysteriously fallen from the open door of a helicopter into a vast Indonesian swamp? That's smoke. The fire came afterward, as the company stock crashed from billions in capitalization to exactly zero. We may be seeing some of the same in the past couple of days. First, a jet crashes in New York, in broad daylight, with a tail rudder that falls off. Such structural failures are not only improbable, they actually seem never to have happened before. Remember the first anthrax letter in Florida? That was the first case in decades. Smells like smoke. The fire is the newsflash that the war on terrorism is still on, fall of Kabul notwithstanding. The second whiff came yesterday from none other than the U.S. President himself. The national Strategic Petroleum Reserve is to be filled to its maximum capacity on his order, amounting to a 30-per-cent top-up. Remember the Japanese and the War of the Pacific 60 years ago? Oil control then was a key factor in the U.S. victory. I would say that this move, along with recent blunt comments regarding Iraq from a usually reticent Secretary of State Colin Powell, signal that stage two of this war is soon to begin. Markets should beware of the surprise risk in all this. When smoke is this heavy, there may be a conflagration down below.