The market seems to be selling-off on the back of limited bad news imo, apart from the dollar that is.

If you can hold your nerve and apart from any short term requirements to offload poor performing stocks, I have a couple!!, my advice would be sit tight. This does not have the feel of the tech(mining!) bubble at all. Difference being there are a lot of good fundamentals, unlike in 2000 when there were a lot of over rated nothing companies.

hope Dow manages to stay above psychological 13,000 level, where it is struggling a bit at the mo ...... certainly not inclined to short though!

could go either way cynic ,that's why iv'e chickened out of playing the indicies today ,i always trade with a stop and you tend to get stopped out before it goes your way in these markets..

She's a long way off her high now. ;-))

was about to say that i fear Dow will finish down, and in the 2 mins that i have been doing something else, i see it is now only +78

since the opening nobody has been buying

Dow is struggling to keep above 13000

Left this site at about 12.30ish with the FT100 flat .....back now and there are 47 posts on this thread and the FT100 now +186!....talk about liquidity and volume )-:

After such a bad couple of weeks it was hardly surprising that a big bounce would come eventually. Look at any long term index chart and you'll see big drops are often followed eventually by a large rise. Depending on the state of the market the rise will either exceed the drop (bull market) or fail short of the peak (bear market). I don't know if the Fed action is anything other than cosmetic. I suspect they took one look at Asia overnight and thought 'maybe we should look like we're doing something' just in case the DOW does 1200 point dive. The relief rally may last several days, but I suspect the rumour mill will soon start asking "what do the Fed know", "who's in trouble", etc. etc. Scared markets remain cynical a lot longer then bullish ones. Be careful out there.

In my opinion.....

Strawbs.

The battle is on for 6k

Dow has lost the 13000 significantly...now nearing 12900

it's bouncing around all over the place ..... now 12980 mid, so scarcely threatening 12900

13 might be unlucky yet. ;-))

Having read a good many of thee posts I get the feeling that there may be quite a few who didn't experience the bursting of the DOT.COM bubble - I know quite a few did and will remember all the talk of "Dubious Sell Off". I, along with many others, found it difficult to finally get the message - but managed to survive.

If you've only traded whilst the markets have been in the bull run take a deep breath and consider whether there is any particular reason why it should stay that way - and then look at what has driven the rise in your stocks. At the beginning of the bear run there were many who had experienced their 2/5/10/20 baggers and religiously held on whilst they dipped - many buying back into the dips - "because they were bound to go back up".

2 outstanding memories remain - Dusty Bin on the dark side who went bankrupt after making over a million trading during the boom - and Scripopholist (now best known for the Betting thread) who was heavily chastised for selling the Nasdaq at 100 a point and making a great deal of money - despite being harangued by hundreds of posters.

I hope I'm just being a bit of a doom merchant and this is just a correction - but, be warned, trade what you see, not what you think the market should do.

mg (feeling a bit like a vicar giving my Sunday sermon:))))

The big difference with the dot.com bubble is that it involved stocks being inflated to huge p/e ratios and even many stocks inflated to billions market cap which didn't have a hope of even making a profit for years. The tech stocks were exceptionally over-valued. This is nothing like the case now, when most stocks are on historically fairly low p/e ratings.

Very true .

A bit like small miners and oils now then. LOL!

mg .... i did the dot.com bubble, and also made a fortune but "forgot" to sell so lost the lot, other than paid off my mortgage (a relative pittance) ..... they were ridiculous times when it was going well; can't remember the particular stock (prob ARM), but it went up and up and up ...... i remember selling out at about 30.00 and being told i was nuts, but clearly forgot something very very basic and paid the penalty

Big Al,

Certainly some of the pure exploration stocks have been over-inflated the last few years and have now come crashing down eg VOG, EME, ELP, PANR, PCI etc etc. There's loads of them, but I have tended to avoid them.
Small miners and oils tend to have quantifiable assets in the ground which do give a value to the company without an existing profit.
Even so, the one small oil company I have invested the most in has existing production, is operationally profitable, has existing proven assets worth many times the market cap, has under-developed and unexplored lease acreage and has just secured a large finance facility on excellent terms to develop them.

So, for some, markets only go up then. The dot.com was just an example, I've been in the markets for about 15 years - that was the most notable - but there have been others - Russia, Thai etc.

All I am really saying is that it is dangerous to get too fixed in your interpretation of the markets - it's now just as easy to make money out of a bear market as it is a bull - so long as you don't try and fight it.

I won't go on 'cos I'm boring myself now.

PS. cynic - my horror story was a company called Medinvest (if my memory serves me) - bought at 10p and again up to 100p - sold half my holding at that price and my broker tried to get me to sell the lot. Instead I bought back on the way down and eventually ended up losing a packet. All the BB talk was of 200p - guaranteed - and, I should have known better, I listened to the herd. It taught me a lot of valuable lessons (some of which I have ignored) - but I'm still here and still trading so I suppose I survived - not as a cynic but as a realist - you simply can't be sure of a sure thing :)

No ones saying that the drop will be as bad as the Dot com one, but what we have seen so far has been a "Market" drop based on "news and sentiment".

What that may lead to is a further "Economic" drop based on lower sales in major economy's.

"We still have no idea where all this debt is packaged away"

More worrying then that BA is that nor do "they" and thats the real crux of the situation (see post 858) the damaging reproecutions of which people fail to appreciate. "

Add this into the equation and you can see why things are far from clear.