Cramer has stuck his neck on the line as he is saying that the market will keep going up. Even though Doug Kass has said this was it.

Ok folks, want to know what is going on? Summer is ending and the pension funds, and all of the other bigger investors are taking a dump. They missed the rally and now at the end of the year they need to tell their investors on why they should get that plane, and that house on Cape Cod.
So Cramer is sticking his neck …

I follow the car industry and have commented on GM, and on July 12, I said the following:
You see I have this thinking that GM management still does not get it. If you looked at the framework of the deal GM America still held a huge chunk of Opel and could buy it back. I am getting the feeling that GM feels that this is just a “road bump” and when things get better everything will be back to normal. However, I don’t think that will happen because GM is …

You might have noticed that in the last few weeks more and more of my posts have been about historical context. Quite frankly for the past couple of months (as the market has been increasing) I have been doing my historical fact checks. I am a discipline of statistics and when you have once in a lifetime opportunities you need to need to look way back, and I mean way back in history.
I started my search in the 1700’s and moved forwards. For my research I read books and papers, …

Nitin made the comment:
Christian I agree with you that economists have gotten it v wrong. Pragmatists like Paulson can identify opportunities well ahead of time and make tons of money with concentrated bets. BTW from where do you get the Great Depression and prior era data on US stocks? I am doing some research on historical PEs of US stocks, not just S&P index PE. Would appreciate if you could tell me the vendors having clean reliable data prior to 1968.

Where do I get my data? …

So I hear on how we are in Great Depression 2, or that the stock market is on sugar, and whatever else. So I guess when I saw the following writing my interest was piqued.
The Great Depression and Panic will come before the Obama administration goes out of office in 2012. Panic and depression have always followed war. The Iraq and Afghanistan war cost the United States more money that any war in the history. Our government debt is almost as great of all the balance of the world put …

The futures market is down, and I look at that with ease since I have plenty of cash sitting in the sidelines again. But then an article caught my eyes. What was of interest to me is the following:
Auch Matthias Brinkmann ist ein intimer Kenner der Schweiz. Seit 1996 betreute der Deutsche den «Swiss Desk» bei der EU-Kommission. Als Beamter und Referatsleiter war er bei allen bilateralen Verhandlungen der letzten Jahre mit dabei. Am 1. September wechselt Brinkmann nun aber in die EU-Vertretung im kanadischen Ottawa.

If you can’t read German …

These economists are not getting it right. They are getting it wrong, time and time, and time again. So what is the new dogma?
Norbert said recently in research notes “the world is in trouble.”
“I believe that the rescue packages brought on have been so costly for so many governments that the exit from this fiscal policy will be very painful, very painful indeed,” he said. “Some of us are already talking about a W-shaped recovery. I’d probably talk about a triple-U-shaped recovery because there are so many stumbling blocks here …

Considering the actions that Microsoft has made in the past week; Nokia deal, trimming of products and focusing on core technologies. Even ZDNet has said that Microsoft is focusing on its core technologies. While they have been focusing, I am still waiting for the hard decisions. But what shifted it for me was the deal with Nokia. That made me shift from pessimistic to neutral.
Right now I am of the opinion given the right price I would buy Microsoft stock. Granted the price is still way to high. I would …

I was recently reading a comment from Barry Diller and I thought dude you are such a twit that it is not even funny.
“It is not free, and is not going to be,” Diller said today at the Fortune Brainstorm conference in Pasadena, California. In addition to IAC, he is chairman of Expedia Inc., the online travel service, and Ticketmaster Entertainment Inc.
Diller, 67, joined a group of media chiefs, from Liberty Media Corp.’s John Malone to Walt Disney Co. CEO Robert Iger, who are challenging the accepted model that consumers …

I was thinking from Bill’s comment in my last blog entry that maybe it is time to start a new normal in investing. I looked at MFI, buy and hold, etc investing styles. I myself am a contrarian and hence bought like a maniac. But right now I am struggling to find buys that interest me. Though there are some, but I am nervous of buying them.
Thus as a mental exercise I was thinking, why not chronicle and write about investing styles? I was wondering if there would be an …