Thrilling Thursday – S&P 2,000!!! Again…
by phil - September 25th, 2014 8:01 am
Wheeeee, what a ride!
This is why we use hedges – they kept us from stopping out of our long positions during the dip and, since our long positions pay off in a flat or up market, anything not down is VERY profitable for our Long-Term positions, which outnumber our bearish Short-Term hedges by 10:1 in our Income Portfolio and Long-Term Portfolio.
Markets do, indeed go up AND down on a pretty regular basis and we've made a lot of bottom calls this week, adding more long positions as we got a nice pullback. Now we have the bounces we predicted and we'll just have to wait and see if our strong bounce lines hold up for the week. Yesterday morning, before the Market, our 5% Rule™ predicted we'd see:
- Dow 17,100 (weak) and 17,150 (strong) – Now 17,210
- S&P 1,990 (weak) and 1,995 (strong) – Now 1,998
- Nasdaq 4,525 (weak) and 4,550 (strong) – Now 4,555
- NYSE 10,875 (weak) and 10,950 (strong) – Now 10,885
- Russell 1,125 (weak) and 1,135 (strong) – Now 1,128
So we have 3 greens and two in-betweens and that's certainly enough to get us to stop being bearish but not quite enough to turn us bullish yet. If we are holding the Strong Bounce lines on the Dow, S&P and Nasdaq, however, we could go long on the Russell, with the …
Dick Cheney’s Oily Dream
by ilene - September 5th, 2010 11:40 pm
Dick Cheney’s Oily Dream
Courtesy of Washington’s Blog
Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair is currently saying that Dick Cheney’s vision of policy towards the Middle East after 9/11 was to re-draw the map:
Vice-President Dick Cheney’s vision of completely redrawing the map of the Middle East following the 9/11 attacks is "not stupid," and is "possible over time," former British Prime Minister Tony Blair says.
In his new book, A Journey, the former Labour Party leader wrote that Cheney wanted a wholesale reorganization of the political map of the Middle East after 9/11. The vice president "would have worked through the whole lot, Iraq, Syria, Iran, dealing with all their surrogates in the course of it — Hezbollah, Hamas, etc," Blair wrote.
What does this mean?
Well, as I have repeatedly pointed out, the "war on terror" in the Middle East has nothing to do with combating terror, and everything to do with remaking that region’s geopolitical situation to America’s advantage.
For example, as I noted in January::
Starting right after 9/11 — at the latest — the goal has always been to create "regime change" and instability in Iraq, Iran, Syria, Libya, Sudan, Somalia and Lebanon; the goal was never really to destroy Al Qaeda. As American reporter Gareth Porter writes in Asia Times:
Three weeks after the September 11, 2001, terror attacks, former US defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld established an official military objective of not only removing the Saddam Hussein regime by force but overturning the regime in Iran, as well as in Syria and four other countries in the Middle East, according to a document quoted extensively in then-under secretary of defense for policy Douglas Feith’s recently published account of the Iraq war decisions. Feith’s account further indicates that this aggressive aim of remaking the map of the Middle East by military force and the threat of force was supported explicitly by the country’s top military leaders.
Feith’s book, War and Decision, released last month, provides excerpts of the paper Rumsfeld sent to President George W Bush on September 30, 2001, calling for the administration to focus not on taking down Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda network but on the aim of establishing "new regimes" in a series of states…
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General Wesley Clark, who commanded the North Atlantic