profitable

The stock market is relatively flat in keeping with the holiday slowdown.  Companies are letting people go home early to save money (which is infinitely better than letting people go period).

We’ll know in the next seven days if the market pops but so far, every indication is that there isn’t going to be a tremendous amount of excitement over the next few weeks.  So, with the Santa Effect in play for the stock market, maybe you can use the holidays to start looking at companies that are making money, will continue to make cash and were hammered along with everything else when the hedge funds had to liquidate cash.

Speaking of liquidity – check out a nice, soothing image of liquid assets to help with the peace and yuletide cheer for the season.

 

 

 

Look for earnings in early January in the tech sector as well as other areas where you will hear the current doom and gloom news.  It is bad, folks, but some companies still will make money.  They may only make millions instead of tens of millions and that is always better than companies that are losing money.

Check the quarterly earnings, the annual reports and if you don’t know how to read a balance sheet, read between the lines of a balance sheet and learn what footnotes REALLY mean, drop me a line.  I may do an article on the nuts and bolts of stock analysis and if pressed, maybe do an article on charting.

Rules of the sleigh ride for the upcoming year will be to try to stay employed, if unemployed, get some income stream, save money and yes, try to invest some money now.  I am bullish for the upcoming year, albeit I have no idea what may happen in short term bursts. 

If you want to try and get presents all year round, do what some of the larger institutions and hedge funds might be doing with their cash.  Research and invest carefully in options.  I talk about a relatively safe option vehicle, covered calls, in my book.  The problem with even “safe” options is that there still is a lot of downside risk unless you “collar” it with a put but that is something you have to decide you want to do.  Do you want to lose some of your profit to prevent unlimited (or limited) losses.  I think it depends on each stock and what the range of trading is as to what to do.  

 

Be safe, be healthy, be happy and start doing some research.

 

 If you are looking for a day job, part time work, suggestions for saving money or investing, please check out my book listed below.  Part of all the proceeds from the sales of that book  go  to Rett Syndrome research.  One girl is born with Rett Syndrome worldwide every fifteen minutes.   My daughter Arianna has Rett Syndrome and we are working to do all we can to make her life easier and find a cure in her lifetime.  Boys born with the Rett gene generally die at birth.

  Practical Money Making-Surviving Recession, Layoffs, Credit Problems, Generating Passive Income Streams, Working Full Time or Part Time and Retirement

Kim Isaac Greenblatt

 

Santa Effect In Play

Tags: Business, stock market

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 25th, 2008 at 12:08 am and is filed under Business. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.