Uh-oh

Hi folks,

I hope everyone has had a great holidays and New Year. We've both been gone enjoying our holidays.

A warning for everyone. The Market is bad. Really bad. A majority of technicals on all the indices have been busted. The financials are busted. Housing is busted. Unemployment is up. I'm going to go ahead and call it--2008 will be very painful for folks long in the Market (somebody call me on this at the end of the year?). The Market could potentially be in free fall. We will have a few bounces and a few re-traces, but in general, the 1st Quarter of 2008 is going to result in a lot of people losing a lot of money.

What can you do?

A few things....You can wait for a bounce and sell what you have and move into more conservative plays like bonds, CD's, high interest savings accounts, or just plain cash. You can play a few Ultrashorts (these are ETF's that run 2 times the inverse of the market--for example: TWM is a Russell Ultra short: every point the Russell goes down, TWM goes up twice as fast). My fav Ultrashorts are SDS, SKF, and TWM--you can see more at http://www.proshares.com/ . You can just ignore everything and rely on 'dollar cost averaging'--which I hope you weren't planning to retire in the next 5 years... or you can make money shorting this crappy Market.

I'll be posting my trades over the next few weeks. Feel free to play along and keep score. I'm currently invested in:

TWM Calls
SKF Calls
C Puts

I put on a Feb 7.50 CFC call at $0.85 today--CFC took it on the chin today. Hard. Big reason was a rumor of Bankruptcy--I believe there will be a few $ bounce back on this since CFC denied the rumors. (Risk Level: Very Risky)

I put on a Mar $25 put on JNS today for 1.20. JNS broke the 200 MDA and as a financial, will prob bomb. (Risk Level: Average)

I'm looking at maybe an S&P put and maybe a few puts on AMZN and RIMM and also reloading on my MGM puts (I made 28% last week on an option trade on MGM). Stay tuned, and I will print my scorecard in the next few days.

Warning: Something I had to learn the hard way....a bear market does not go straight down...it respects technicals (btw, fundamentals easily trump technicals) and can easily pop on you leaving you high and dry at OpEx.

Hang in there and make some cash.

-Rocketshoe