A positive attitude may not solve all your problems, but it will annoy enough people to make it worth the effort.
--Herm Albright

Chartzes and table Zup...

Workin' hard to get my Ira's 'n 401 to perform this year in a bidirectional market. It take as much guts as it does brains. Risk vs reward and ya can't surf the investment oceans without gettin' soaked occasionally. And if'n it all works out, the thrill counteracts the chill. Works for me in the long run. Which for me is different from what you think it is. For me, the long run is what you end up with after all the short runs are tallied up.

I've gotten my nose bloodied good learning how to handle my money. Most of the mess was caused by learning why I couldn't just rely soley on putting my money down on something someone identified as a good investment "in the long run", having faith, "taking pain", and hanging on. Successful investing is more complicated than that. If I was dialed in to what was really happening; if I had access to a lot of raw economic data, if I ground the data up myself, if I knew about all the executive suite strategic initiatives, if I had ongoing measures of the success of execution of the initiatives, and if I knew the course changes being put into place at the lower levels of the companies, I could invest for the long run as most everyone understands it. Provided I could change my mind about staying with it at any moment.

Most everyone understands the long run as they would like it to be. You buy once, you stay put, and that's all there is to it. Ya just gotta believe and hang on. I'd have to see it everyday to believe in it. Enron, Microsoft, Apple, Google, Worldcom,and General Electric have had their believers. All of the believers made money. Some of them made a lot of money and still have it. Some of them only made a little money. All the believers lost at least some money and some of them lost all of it. Faith based investing is really hard and dangerous.

It's hard for some people with less faith to believe there are one decision stocks so they are more comfortable looking for one decision investment advisors or mutual funds. Life should be so easy. My life ain't 'cuz I've done the due diligence and looked over the edge. Check out the COFGBLOG Essay pages, the chart pages and the Fund Alarm pages of my site.

There are long term trends. If you can identify them, you can ride them and make some money. The sooner you can identify the end of the trend, the more money you can keep. The sooner you can bail out an investment that was a mistake, the less money you lose. The sooner you get comfortable with playing hardball with your money; grinding out the profits and exterminating losses, the better your results. The key word is soon. Soon is not about faith, it is about getting something done in not much time. Put together successful day, weeks, and months all in a row, a lot of short measures of time, and all of a sudden, ya got a long run.

So I went with the trend in the long run one week, at at time. The charts and tables say it all. Now I'm leery of a trend break, and whereas I weighted some of the 401 fundz pretty heavily, now I gotta weigh weighing heavily in the GIC.

Want some clarity about the past? Check out the Fund Alarm tables and the charts page. There is a pretty important tale to be told there.

Stay Tooned.