The stock market isn’t all that’s happening in the world, not by a long shot… but it’s some of the news. Predicting it is a full time job for some. Fortunately, not for me. But I’m interested. And I have a tiny position in the market. A bear position, of course.

I was reading some material yesterday that really hit me. I’m not a technical… a person who believes that the patterns of the Dow Jones repeat in certain ways. They can, yes. But just because the Market moved in a certain way the last time a certain pattern occurred, I do not believe that it will necessarily act the same this time. Not necessarily.

But sometimes it does.

An erudite technical named Al Coryell made a chart of the market just before the Crash of 1929, and a chart of recent movements . You can almost overlay the pattern, point for point. If you want, you can see that here:

http://www.thepanicnews.com/2009/09/18/is-todays-stock-market-doing-a-dead-cat-bounce-similar-to-the-stock-market-crash-of-1929-which-ushered-in-the-great-depression/

He does a more recent, more extensive analysis on this page:

http://www.thepanicnews.com/2010/02/08/is-that-a-dead-cat-bounce-ing-off-that-k-wave/

It seems that we have continued to move along that fault line.

The bit about the dead cat bounce is marketspeak for a short rebound after a sharp decline, which is exactly what has been happening in the market during the past year. The only point of disagreement between anyone is whether the rebound will continue, up, up, up the ziggurat… or falter a little bit… or complete the dead cat bounce, which ends in a sharp decline. Splat.

You can guess which one I think it is.

Al says we’ll know for sure when the market (currently at about 10,300) reaches 3,000.

On its way to 400.

One of the most difficult categories of food to stock as emergency supplies is protein. In the past, there was a lot of powdered egg and milk. Today there is a much wider choice of good tasting, protein-rich entries from companies that supply emergency food, most notably the top-rated maker of freeze-dried food, Mountain House.

But I’ve found something else I also like very much: Cytosport™ Pure Protein,Tangerine flavor (none of the other flavors even come close). Pure Protein contains 40 grams of whey protein that somehow manages to taste sort of like the old-time Orange Julius drinks they used to make fresh with orange juice. (more…)

They’re still talking about this in the media from time to time… the thing that happened on so-called Black Friday, where the sales associate was killed by a rampaging mob of shoppers.

The guy was 6-foot-5 and 270 lbs., and yeah, he had no training at crowd control, but that is still quite a large person to be swept under the feet of stampeding consumers.

This was for a sale. No emergency, no life-threatening disaster was happening. Just the chance of saving a few dollars on items that have little or no impact on a person’s survival.

Imagine what it would be like if a situation were to occur where people thought they needed to buy food right now or they would starve.
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