Tuesday, October 11, 2011

Noise

Bloggers are supposed to write about stuff that either excite them or bugs them. Politics, religion, sex, technology, bureaucracy, health, food, you name it. Here, I am supposed to write about stuff that impacts your money.

Here is a secret - it is getting very difficult to get excited about anything. All markets are going nowhere in a Brownian dance of futility. For all you who took Shakespeare in college, Brownian motion is the random movement of atoms or particles as forces act on them from all directions. Net net is that they go nowhere.

And you thought there was a Bush/FEMA joke hiding in there. That would have been one heckuva joke, but I digress.

Today, the media reported the market were nervous ahead of Slovakia's vote on further EU bailouts or whatever for Greece.  Funny - after the market closed and Slovakia grew a pair with a thumbs down vote, the markets did not budge. Not stocks, not bonds, not gold, not the dollar. The euro did move a little lower but not much.

So much for the morning "reasons" why the market was doing what it was doing.

The bottom line is everything these days is noise.  If you want to cope, you had better dust off your weekly charts and take a bigger picture view.

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