google search for financialsense.com. lots of good contrarian opinions there. Ben Graham's "The intelligent Investor" is the bible, so is Philip Fisher's "Common Stocks and Uncommon Profits". Above all never buy anything on margin..
here are some quotes that may give one some ideas what a jungle out there in the financial markets (SPs are truly the honest folks!):
Back in the 1920s: "The beauty of doing business with a crook is that he always forgives you for catching him, so long as you don't stop doing business with him." (Reminiscences of a stock operator (1923))
The early 1970s, a stock exchange governor commenting on stolen securities, etc. "The Mafia couldn't possibly have stolen that much money, " he said. "Good people had to steal too. The temptation was too great." Supermoney (1972)
1997 Asian Contagion: Forex traders on the then Malaysian Prime Minister after the latter blaming the hedge funds and forex hot money for the meltdown in the Asian financial markets:
"Tell him we are selling his ringgit. Then we gonna screw his wife and his daughter. Then we gonna burn down his house and have a party afterwards."
So proceed with caution. Keep your eye on your cash flow and discretionary spending.
Very likely real estate has topped. Remember Tokyo in 1989? Things may not be that bad here or even in the US as the RE bubble was nowhere near the one in Japan of the 1980s. But there is a huge credit crunch coming, unwinding all the excesses in RE for the last 20 -30 years. No one lost any $ in real estate. Tell that to the folks in Detroit or Windsor. Or Calgary in the 1980s. Remember Nuwest, Daon???
Perhaps on more a global view, it pays to remember the with each dawning of a new century initial hopes would likely be dashed by cold reality of geopolitics. At the close of 19th century the land mass of the world was split among five major empires in the west : the Czarist Russia, the Austro-Hungary Empire, Kaiser Germany, Ottoman Empire and the British Empire, and in the far east, the Manchurian Qing and the Japanese Chrysanthemum Empire. Within two decades of the new century, five of seven empires had been banished to the history dustbin.
We may be seeing the same thing here.. Which could have some interesting implications for both the financial markets as well as for the commodities markets..One may no longer be able to ignore what is going on in Sudan anymore as it is more than just a country on the map of Africa.
..
