A Few Good Men, Clemens Style

Enjoy on this cold Saturday in NY!

Clemens: You want answers?

Congressman: I think I’m entitled to them.

Clemens: You want answers?

Congressman: I want the truth!

Clemens: You can’t handle the truth! Son, we live in a world that has baseballs. And those balls have to be hit by men with bats. Who’s gonna do it? You? You, Congressman? I have a greater responsibility than you can possibly fathom. You weep for steroids and you curse HGH. You have that luxury. You have the luxury of not knowing what I know: that HGH, while illegal, probably sells tickets. And my existence, while grotesque and incomprehensible to you, sells tickets…You don’t want the truth. Because deep down, in places you don’t talk about at parties, you want me on that mound. You need me on that mound. We use words like fastall, slider, splitfinger…we use these words as the backbone to a life spent playing a sport. You use ’em as a punchline. I have neither the time nor the inclination to explain myself to a man who rises and falls asleep to the Sportscenter clips I provide, then questions the manner in which I provide it! I’d rather you just said thank you and went on your way. Otherwise, I suggest you pick up a bat and dig in. Either way, I don’t give a damn what you think you’re entitled to!

Congressman: Did you order the HGH?

Clemens: (quietly) I did the job you sent me to do.

Congressman: Did you order the HGH?

Clemens: You’re god damn right I did!!

Can we STOP with the Predictions?

Too many talking heads and so-called market experts continue to make predictions on the market, the economy and the general direction of this country (and the world for that matter). I can’t stand predictions (except for Plaxico Burress’ prediction prior to the Super Bowl last week – Go Giants).

I have compiled a list of excellent quotes to combat the constant bombardment of predictions on television, in magazines, on blogs, the internet and on the nightly news; I love quotes and agree with the ones below 110%!

Try and predict the market while trading and you will go broke, that I can predict with certainty. The men and women below couldn’t have been more correct when speaking of the ignorant dopes that try to predict everything in life! When will the predictors learn to shut up? I know: when idiots stop listening to them and paying for their garbage (see best seller doomsday list).

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Enjoy, it’s a fun post today!

  • “Those who have knowledge, don’t predict. Those who predict, don’t have knowledge.” – Lao Tzu
  • “He who knows, does not speak. He who speaks, does not know.” – Lao Tzu
  • “Never make predictions, especially about the future.” – Casey Stengel
  • “Trying to predict the future is like trying to drive down a country road at night with no lights while looking out the back window.” – Peter Drucker
  • “If one could foresee the next three days, one could become rich for several thousand years.” – Anonymous
  • “If you learn one thing from having lived through decades of changing views, it is that all predictions are necessarily false.” – M. H. Abrams
  • “I figure lots of predictions is best. People will forget the ones I get wrong and marvel over the rest.” – Alan Cox (the MEDIA!)
  • “History can predict nothing except that great changes in human relationships will never come about in the form in which they have been anticipated.” – Johan Huizinga
  • “You can only predict things after they have happened.” – Eugene Ionesco
  • “In the future, instead of striving to be right at a high cost, it will be more appropriate to be flexible and plural at a lower cost. If you cannot accurately predict the future then you must flexibly be prepared to deal with various possible futures.” – Edward de Bono
  • “You never know what the next day is going to bring. That goes for football, goes for off the field, and I gave up a long time ago trying to predict the future and trying to deal with things I couldn’t deal with.” – Brett Favre
  • “Predictions of the future are never anything but projections of present automatic processes and procedures, that is, of occurrences that are likely to come to pass if men do not act and if nothing unexpected happens; every action, for better or worse, and every accident necessarily destroys the whole pattern in whose frame the prediction moves and where it finds its evidence.” – Hannah Arendt
  • “To predict the behavior of ordinary people in advance, you only have to assume that they will always try to escape a disagreeable situation with the smallest possible expenditure of intelligence.” – Friedrich Nietzsche
  • “The unpredictability inherent in human affairs is due largely to the fact that the by-products of a human process are more fateful than the product.” – Eric Hoffer
  • “My predictions are notably inaccurate.” – Robert Caro

And Finally…

  • “The best way to predict the future is to invent it.” – Alan Kay

The Blog is Hot

Chrisperruna.com may be hitting a tipping point here in early 2008 as the statistics blew away the slow holiday month of December. They even crushed my best month of November by a wide margin. The best part is that I didn’t have any special links that boosted my traffic in one particular day. I did have links throughout the month from several of the higher traffic blogs such as TraderMike, Traderfeed, The Big Picture and the Wall Street Journal Online (and many others) but my daily traffic was steady throughout the month on days without links.

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This tells me that people are really enjoying my work with confirmation by the dozens of positive statements in my comments (bottom of each blog entry).

I want to thank you all for taking the time out of your very busy schedules to visit my small education and equity research blog – I love what I do here, it’s a passion of mine!

My feedburner subscriptions are increasing but I don’t think many of you know that my blog posts can be sent to you via e-mail updates or through your favorite home page readers such as Google and Yahoo (among others).

Click the large icons below and sign up for FREE to get my daily blog posts in your e-mail and/or favorite reader:

Page views and visits were up by more than 66% and 53% respectively for the best month ever. Thank you again – I really do appreciate every single reader of this blog and especially readers that leave their excellent comments!

My goal is to become one of the best stock market blogs offering quality and unbiased equity research along with the education to help you succeed. We are well on our way to 100,000 page views per month (with an ultimate goal of 1 million per month) and I owe it all to the readers!

World Markets Plunge

Stocks were hammered worldwide Monday following Wall Street’s declines last week and speculation of a US led recession. Media outlets are blaming a weak stimulus plan developed by the US government as the culprit in some of the largest one day declines in world markets since the 9/11 attacks.

Luckily for us, our markets were closed in celebration of the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday. But, we must open Tuesday morning with the added pressure of watching the world drop, sending fear into investors within the lower 48. Will we follow the pack and drop heavily or open with a contrary attitude? If I was a betting man, we open lower with a gap.

The charts below highlight the large drops (many with opening gap-downs) in several markets across multiple continents (Europe, Asia and South America):

  • Britain’s benchmark FTSE-100 slumped 5.5% to 5,578.20
  • France’s CAC-40 Index tumbled 6.8% to 4,744.15
  • Germany’s blue-chip DAX 30 plunged 7.2% to 6,790.19
  • India’s benchmark stock index, Sensex, fell 7.4%
  • Hong Kong’s blue-chip Hang Seng index plummeted 5.5% to 23,818.86
  • Canadian S&P/TSX composite index was down more than 4%
  • Brazil’s stocks plunged 6.9% on the main index of Sao Paulo’s Bovespa exchange
  • Japan’s benchmark Nikkei 225 index slid 3.9% to close at 13,325.94 points
  • China’s Shanghai Composite index plunged 5.1%

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  • The drop in Hong Kong’s market was its biggest percentage drop since the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks
  • The Nikkei gave Japan its lowest close in more than two years
  • Japan’s Nikkei has now declined 13% in 2008
  • India’s Sensex saw its second-biggest percentage drop ever (it was down nearly 11% intraday)
  • Hong Kong’s Hang Seng is now down more than 14% in 2008
  • China’s Shanghai Index is down 6.6% in 2008 and more than 20% from its all time high from October

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The Best of chrisperruna.com in 2007

I went ahead and developed an excellent recap of the “best of 2007″ chrisperruna.com educational articles. I am not including entries written about specific stocks as they can be found by doing a simple search using their ticker symbols.

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If you missed anything from 2007 or are a new reader, here’s a second chance to digest some of the most talked about material from the past year. The articles are listed starting in January 2007. Some great material can be found throughout this post!

Happy New Year!

January

February

March

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