Becoming a Bear

I've been a bull so far, constantly looking for opportunities to buy stock. But the more I look around, the more I see that bulls just aren't making money right now. Every stock that looks like it's about to hit a bottom and move up somehow ends up blowing through support and continues on a perpetual unending slide downward. It's like gravity has overtaken the market and continues to pull it further and further down. Will this change someday? Maybe, but it doesn't look like it's going to happen anytime soon. But what does it matter to me if the market continues to slide? To be quite honest, I know the bears won't be able to take the entire market to zero, but they're going to try and take it as far down as they possibly can. When the market converts back to a bull, then I may revisit a bullish stance and seek to bring out that inner bull again. However, for the time being, I'm a bear. I only hope that the SEC doesn't make bears illegal now...

Stock Comparison

Z Market Rules for Trading

Here at Z Market, we're in the process of adapting a process that we can use to trade to make the most amount of successful trades each month. Our initial goal is to make a profit of 3% per week. Over the last number of months of evaluating the market, there have been several important observations made about the way the markets work and how to respond to them. 

Rule 1: Examine P/E Ratios

In "How to Make Money in Stocks" by William J. O'Neil, we find the following quotation that has been very important in coming to some conclusions on purchasing stock trades.  He says that "primary consideration should be given to whether the rate of change in earnings is substantially increasing or decreasing." On the basis of this, it's important to chart the P/E over time of a stock and see how that ratio is faring in consideration to the stock price. As an test of this observation, I'm going to update this post with several of my favorite stocks over the next week. 

As of  9/29/08:

RIMM: 22.6

AAPL: 25

MSFT: 14.4

RIG: 7.6

CHK: unavailable

TRLG: 20.2

WMT: 18.1

TGT: 15.4

GS: 18.3

WB: unavailable

USB: 15.8

BAC: 20.2

GOOG: 28 

YHOO: 25.26

Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) Ready to blast off?

As Google's price keeps dropping and dropping, I'm amazed to see it going lower and lower. This stock is close to half it's value earlier this year, but has always reported strong quarters and even recently was sported as one of the strongest stocks out there.

Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) A Big Buy?

Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) has been trading lower and lower hovering around 160. Most of what has taken this stock down seems to be the overall broad market and the tech stocks have been going down since Dell reported a pretty bad former quarter.