Larry,
Your not kidding every time the market starts to tank news comes out about some terroist being captured or about to be captured. By the way has anyone heard anything about Saddam Hussien in the last couple of months?

Gary

Gary, here's what's going on with Saddam. Evidentally he thinks he can out smart his interrogators...

http://news.myway.com/top/article/id/344368|top|03-18-2004::15:30|reuters.html

Larry

Gary,
I'm not one for conspiracy theories, mostly because I think these guys aren't really that bright, but here, even I start to wonder. To announce that Pakistan, may have an area surrounded that may contain a high value target that may be OBL's #2 strikes me as a bit premature. That it is prematurely announced in the middle of a solid decline makes me begin to wonder who's trying to play a game.
However I'm a strong believer that no matter how powerful a government is, the market can't be fixed for long. It will be interesting to watch what happens today.
h

Howard,

It is interesting to me that we have had 3 flagpole rallies so far in this decline. 2 have failed to move the market and in fact the market lost all of the gains from both fairly quickly. The third one on Wednesday was in the process of losing all the gains the very next day until we got the news from Pakistan. If in fact these rallies are sponsored by an administration that is willing to do almost anything to get reelected (I think they are smart enough to realize that there won't be a Republican in the oval office if the bear market comes back) you've got to wonder how much we're adding to the deficit every time one of these rallies fails

I’m going to ignore the ridiculous implied assertion that some administrations are willing to “do almost anything to get elected” more than other administrations. Also, if I can dismiss the notion that there is something new about attempts to influence market behavior by the spreading of rumors (it’s been going on since the beginning of time and it’s much more of a Wall Street thing than a government thing), then maybe we can turn this thread into something useful.

And a useful question would be how exactly has the market behaved in presidential election years? Since 1950, the S&P has been relatively flat from the first of January until the end of March: up an average of about 2%. One standard deviation would be up about 7% or down about 3%. It’s not the end of March yet, but so far the S&P is up about 1%. So what we know at this point is that the market behavior we’ve seen is very normal for an election year.

And then after March, historically, things start picking up. By the end of the year the S&P has gained an average of about 9%. One standard deviation would be up about 21% or down about 3%. So anything the market does outside of that range would be unusual. Also, if the market is not up for the year by August it would be fairly unusual.

The really strong year is the year before a presidential election year. And, true to form, that’s exactly what we had in 2003. So I think what we can learn from history is that if the market does something outside the norm like go down more than 3% or go up more than 21% then something might be going on that we need to consider. Until then, it's just another presidential election year.

Larry

Aww come on Larry your spoiling all our fun I don't know about anybody else, but for myself I'm not trading on any assumptions that the government is going to be rescuing the market. My earnings season system has about an 86% positive expectancy if the trend is very clear which in my opinion it was clearly down on Feb. 10. That's good enough for me. I seem to remember you were going to hold my feet to the fire and make me stick to my system. Since I don't want burned feet I'm sticking.

Gary