CHESSNOID

Tonight was an interesting night watching the New Hampshire Primaries with my wife. We both watched as Hillary Clinton and John McCain won their respective parties majority votes. Both seem to be the comeback kids. Both were beaten in the previous Iowa Caucus by Barack Obama and Mike Huckabee. I would guess that both parties will have interesting races all the way to the final party nomination. This is the first time I have taken an interest in these political processes early on other than just voting for the president. I share the same views as most other citizens that we need a significant change immediately. Thank goodness Bush can’t run again and steal another election illegally. There are a lot of conspiracy blogs and websites that claim he may try to do a martial law takeover of the government. I don’t see that happening but you never know.

I was checking my stats, links, etc and noticed that I was getting some referrals from the Wall Street Journal. This happens every once in a while and when I click the referring link to check out why, I usually can’t find the source. Today was different when I checked and found a link to my previous post at the bottom of one of their articles. SWEET! That was really cool. I enclosed a screen picture before my blog post gets bumped off.

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The Nasdaq market has now closed down 8 days in a row. That doesn’t really indicate anything substantial or technical worthiness, just one of those weird things where you think the probability of it closing 9 days down straight is hard to swallow. Just like when you are playing the card game blackjack, you figure the odds of you losing 9 times in a row is close to impossible. But when you are playing with real money, Murphy’s law kicks in. I guess that’s why I don’t gamble. I put the last 8 days closing numbers. Let’s see which way the market closes tomorrow.

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I am not a technical trader, but I really do like reading about it and help me form my own opinions of the overall market. I found through stumbleupon a blog Alpha Trends that actually gives a very good analysis of the markets with commentary via youtube.com This is one of the sites I have revisited because of the good quality of analysis of the numbers.

According to CNN.Money we have already had a correction of 10% from our November highs:

The market was also at the mercy of technical market factors, with all three major gauges now having fallen 10 percent off the highs hit in November, on a closing level, the technical definition of a market correction. In the next few days, this could spark a much bigger leg down, or bring in a wave of new money as investors seek to buy at lower levels.

“We’ve gotten very oversold, and we’ve seen this technical correction, so I wouldn’t rule out a short-term rally,” said Ryan Atkinson, market analyst at Balestra Capital.

“But I don’t think we’ve put in a bottom here,” he said. “We may be at the start of a bear market, which would be typical of a recession.”

Although others are less inclined to call the recent selloff the makings of a bear market, it has certainly been a brutal start to the year.

Year-to-date, the S&P 500 has lost about 5.3 percent, the Dow industrials has fallen 5.1 percent and the Nasdaq composite has fallen 8 percent year-to-date.