September Swoon?

This market rally sure feels thin. If I were a gambling man, I would say September should be a mess.

I don’t gamble and I try to avoid trading based on feel.

I do have some experience so my feel comes from the sour mood developing on Wall Street. Bonuses will likely suck. They should.

Markets climb a wall of worry so the old adage goes, but what about ignorance and panic? I think ignorance and panic lead to the blame game and the blame game is never good for the market. Wall Street works better when the brokers are on offense.

Trust me, they are on defense !

As ‘marketing guru’ Seth Godin aptly points out in this post :

All real estate brokers working today have thrived in an environment in which the price of a house increased on a regular basis for fifty years. Fifty years. Of course, it’s not just home sellers, it’s us, too. Consumers have built their financial lives around this shared belief.

With home prices dropping for the first time in…forever, I am more focused on defense. Unwinding ‘shared belief’ could be ugly. Because this trend has gone on so long, the rookies are going to be absolutely annihalated.

My wife is a bankruptcy attorney…a good one. When I asked her to read this New York Times piece on the mortgage crisis , it reminded her of the RTC and Savings and Loan crisis. Lovely how history has repeated itself in such short order, this time on massive steroids.

We have a major oversupply of housing and development. It will take time. Those with cash and a good eye are going to amass untold new fortunes.

There is definately some leadership in tech and I am staying the course, but I am not looking to get back on margin anytime soon.

Interesting cocktail for sure. September is shaping up to be a wild one.