fortune favors the bold..........

MARKET PERFORMANCE

Year 2004

12/31/03 12/31/04 2004
Close Close Performance


DJIA 10,453.90 10,783.01 Up 3.15%

S&P 500 1,111.92 1,211.92 Up 8.99%

NASDAQ 2,003.37 2,175.44 Up 8.59%

Russell 2000 556.91 651.57 Up 16.99%


January 7, 2004

Hello,
Dan, Dan duck an cover, where are you Dan….when the going got tuff Dan is no where to be found…courage Dan, Courage…So far the January effect has been noticeable absent . Buyers seem disgruntled, while sellers greet each day with glee. Each passing day has given the sellers a new reason to sell. Many of the reasons to sell are met with “myopic zeal”, and most of the reasons seem fallacious and recycled; like there is no political bias at CBS, or smoking gives you cancer, or consumer spending will slow down or most likely it is Roger Ailes fault or Bush or the bloggers or the FED or the budget, trade or some other deficit. Yes folks it is glum and the end is near. The trade deficit continues to grow because our economy is still growing faster than our trading partners. Because consumers are forced to save so much money shopping at wall mart, they continue to spend on new cars and new homes. Things simple could not get any worse. In fact the real “axis of evil” tax cuts, Karl Rove and Halliburton have managed one more awful result, the budget deficit is actually declining. Be very, very quite don’t tell anyone but the tax cuts caused and increase in revenues of 10.5 % while government spending during a war only increased 6.1% .Yes I know the old folks only get free medicine not free booze and mid night basketball was cancelled, but hey we all gotta make sacrifices.

If you’re “tired of the freak show of political pornography”, and are pondering why so often good news gets met with grunts and groans, I have a few ideas as to why the market has clearly lost it’s mojo. First the Iraqi election has the terrorist and their backers (Iran, Syria and others) scrambling to do as much destruction as possible because they know this election will signal the end of the legitimacy of the tyrannies that govern the mid east. Obviously oil facilities are in direct threat and there for so is the fuel that propels the worlds engine. 2nd It is becoming more and more obvious that the “insurgency” in Iraqi is being financed and fueled and fought by outside forces ,except for the remnants of the old Bathest Regime. They have no popular or religious backing what so ever. This implies that these forces will have to be dealt with. Rumors are circulating that Syria may be next and the offensive will come as early as February right after the Iraqi election. 3rd some of our “friends” in the mid east like Saudi Arabia may also oppose a free and independent Iraq. A friendly Iraq will lessen our dependence on their oil and put pressure on others in the mid east to form more open and representative societies.

And finally it seems the cost of the Presidential Inauguration has gotten some peoples skirts up .If the New York Yankees can have a $201 million dollar payroll on a baseball team and the UN can skin at lest 1.4 billion from the oil for food program or better put from the starving mouths of Iraqi children, I hardly think $40 million dollars in private donations is a big deal one way or the other. And what about those gift bags at the Golden Globes, some say they were worth $40 thousand a bag no scaling back there. I need to get out more.

Remember you can “bork” but you can only “bork” so often

James

http://www.jamesfoytlin.com/

http://onesmallvoice.blogspot.com/




10:17 ET 2005 Will Be A Good Year : 2005 is bound to a good year for the stock market. Why? Because all years that end in a "5" have been good years. There is no rational explanation for it, but the years ending in "5" have all been years of positive returns for the stock market. The following table illustrates the total returns of the market, measured by the S&P500 since 1905. (The S&P500 did not exist prior to 1950, the earlier historical returns are reconstructed returns.) (BRIEFING.COM)
Year
Total Return %
1905 7.0
1915 14.0
1925 13.0
1935 46.0
1945 35.7
1955 31.0
1965 12.3
1975 36.9
1985 31.1
1995 34.0
No Guarantee The above trend is more than 100 years old with a 100% accuracy.