Down 8% now. Damned if you sell, damned if you don't? How about damned if you sell some, but not others?
More importantly, how about no pain no gain?
Right now in the teeth of the selloff into the debt ceiling crisis you already had stocks it was too late to sell, even as you had a whole host of other stocks that you could sell and buy back lower if you still like them.
You already saw the beginning of the move of the deflationary trades, the commodity users in particular, think General Mills (GIS). The decline in the velocity of the telcos and some of the other utes was very noticeable.
But other stocks are clearly in the free fall phase and the question there is do you want to own them? The best way to visualize this is to ask if I were to come in and sell that stock of yours, would you buy it back?
That's what you have to ask yourself now.
I thought today was truly demoralizing because the president hasn't begun the process and the Republicans are seemingly disorganized. It is as if we have to wait until the second or third week of January before anything is agreed to, or, if the market fell another 10%, to be down 18% from the high then the attention would be paid to this potential financial disaster.
Bad day.
