Fortune Watch

The year 2008 has entered the record books for all of the wrong reasons; the Dow Jones had its worst year ever! So what about 2009, how will stock markets from around the world perform and which are the stocks to follow?

Well in reality you need a crystal ball to be able to answer these questions. 2009 may well be another tough year.

I am a person who enjoys investing on the stock markets and I have to say that I am a bit of a gambler; I am quite prepared to take a risk with my disposable income in the hope that I can increase it etc. Just a quick note however, I am a financial adviser and anything that I write or suggest in this article should not be seen as advice.

I personally believe in investing an amount of money (an amount that I can afford) on a monthly basis instead of investing lump sums. This way I am able to take advantage of what is commonly referred to as Dollar cost averaging in the United States. This is where when prices are high your monthly contribution may buy fewer shares or fund units but that when prices are low your investment buys more shares or fund units.

During these volatile times this method of investing may prove to be the most prudent. Even though stock markets had a very poor 2008 and is therefore quite low there may well be significant falls ahead.
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Let’s say the U.S. government completely nationalizes AIG, so that the new entity now shares the government’s AAA rating.

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A company’s ownership of its equipment, furnishings and supplies, as well as its employees’ time, would seem to be an obvious fact. To appropriate company property is theft, or if money – then embezzlement.

But if we look closer, we will see that some form of corporate theft is happening every day in every workplace, and it may be difficult to know what is theft and what is not. Perhaps you phone your husband from the office. That’s technically theft of facilities but widely accepted everywhere. Charging-up your cell-phone is using the company’s electricity. If you work in a clothing factory, there’ll be clothes that can’t be sold, owing to faulty cutting or stitching. But they can still be worn, and if you don’t take them, they’ll just go in the bin. That perhaps seems reasonable enough – except that it could encourage dishonest workers to produce rejects to order!

Consider the theft of usable merchandise. I once knew a storeman in a small bakery who liked to bake his own bread at home, and the manager was happy to let him have a bucket of dough every few weeks. As nobody else was involved, there were no complaints. However, this kind of gesture could be taken, by the bakery owner, as theft, i.e. supplying or taking company property without payment or authority.

And scale is the key to this issue – the danger of small pilfering turning into something more serious, i.e. serious theft.
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President-Elect Barack Obama’s transition team is reported to be deeply divided over whether to offer a post to Monica Lewinsky, the former White House Intern whose intimate relationship with President Bill Clinton led to his impeachment.

No decision has been reached as to exactly what sort of job Lewinsky might be offered.
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Well the stimulus package is finally finished. A tough new bank-rescue plan to boost lending and limit outrageous pay are part of President Obama.. Even troubled homeowners may even get some relief. All said and done, the government could spend more than $3 trillion to help end the recession.

All we have to do now is sit back and watch the economy grow, am I correct?

One risk of the unprecedented government intervention is that it won’t do all that much to speed up the end of the recession. Another risk is that consumers, expecting a magic fix, could fail to prepare for tough times that still lie ahead. Obama himself said at his first press conference. “This is going to be a difficult year, If we get things right, then starting next year we can start seeing some significant improvement.”

Next year? I’m afraid not. A large number of economists agree that it will take that long, at least, before the biggest problems – mounting layoffs, the housing bust, the banking crisis, and plunging confidence – start to turn around. Whether the stimulus package is actually working, and when the economy might start to mend, here are a few things to watch.

Improvement In The Unemployment Rate. Of all the economic indicators, this is probably the single most important. But you might want to avert your eyes for awhile.

If the stimulus plan works it might come close to creating 3 to 4 million jobs which Obama has talked about.. And that – over several years, combined. But it’s almost certain that through this summer and into the fall, there will be a net job loss, not a gain. Most economists expect the unemployment rate, now 7.6 percent, to hit at least 9 percent by the end of this year. That represents up to 2 million more lost jobs.But the pink slips haven’t all gone out yet, so the layoffs haven’t shows up in the official numbers.
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Basic Management Lesson

“If you ever see me getting beaten by the police, put down the video camera and come help me.”  –Bobcat Goldthwait

“I’ve been doing the Fonda workout: the Peter Fonda workout.  That’s
where I wake up, take a hit of acid, smoke a joint, and run to my
sister’s house and ask her for money.”  –Kevin Meaney

“My mom said she learned how to swim. Someone took her out in the lake and threw her off the boat. That’s how she learned how to swim. I said, ‘Mom, they weren’t trying to teach you how to swim.’ ” –Paula Poundstone

“In elementary school, in case of fire you have to line up quietly in a
single file line from smallest to tallest. What is the logic?  Do tall people burn slower?” –Warren Hutcherson

“I have six locks on my door all in a row. When I go out, I lock every
other one. I figure no matter how long somebody stands there picking the locks, they are always locking three.” –Elayne Boosler

“Ever wonder if illiterate people get the full effect of alphabet soup?”     –John Mendoza

“Today I met with a subliminal advertising executive for just a  second.”
–Steven Wright

“Relationships are hard. It’s like a full-time job, and we should treat
it like one. If your boyfriend or girlfriend wants to leave you, they should give you two weeks’ notice. There should beseverance pay, and
before they leave you, they should have to find you a temp.” –Bob Ettinger
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President Barack Obama pressed Congress Monday night to urgently approve a massive economic recovery bill, using the first prime-time news conference of his presidency to warn that a failure to act “could turn a crisis into a catastrophe.”

With the nation falling deeper into a long and painful recession, Obama defended his program against Republican criticism that it is loaded with pork-barrel spending and will not create jobs.

“The plan is not perfect,” the president said, addressing the nation from the East Room of the White House. “No plan is. I can’t tell you for sure that everything in this plan will work exactly as we hope, but I can tell you with complete confidence that a failure to act will only deepen this crisis as well as the pain felt by millions of Americans.”

When the stimulus bill passed the House, not a single Republican voted for it. On Monday an $838 billion version of the legislation cleared a crucial test vote in the Senate by a 61-36 margin, with all but three Republican senators opposing it.

Obama said the federal government was the only power that could save the nation at a time of crisis, with huge spending outlays and tax cuts that he contended could save or create up to 4 million jobs.

“At this particular moment, with the private sector so weakened by this recession, the federal government is the only entity left with the resources to jolt our economy back to life,” Obama said.
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Some people consult astrologers and some don’t. Out of the ones that don’t, some believe that there aren’t any good astrologers around nowadays while others believe that it isn’t possible to foretell the future.

Out of the ones who believe that foretelling the future is impossible, some believe that the future can’t be foretold because there is no future yet. Meaning, the future is not preordained so there’s nothing to foretell. It happens when it happens.

Not just astrology, I find the equivalent of all these views among investment analysts. In investments, there are times when the one can forecast with some degree of confidence because the current trends can be expected to continue unchanged. There are often long periods when trends just extend themselves in a linear fashion.

There are other times, when there’s a break in the trend and the past stops being a good guide to the future. When trends are smooth, then these expectations are true and the forecasts are also true. However, when there’s a break then the future is not predictable. Which is exactly what is happening now.

Currently, there is no shortage of experts trying to predict when the economic crisis will end and growth will resume. I’ve seen predictions ranging from immediate (as in, the crisis has ended we just haven’t noticed yet) to one estimate that said it will ‘take a generation for things to be normal again’. Between the two extremes lie more frequent estimates like late 2009 or 2010 or early 2011. These ‘reasonable’ estimates occur with a greater frequency so they’ve started sounding reasonable.
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The United States lost almost 600,000 jobs last month and the unemployment rate rose to 7.6 per cent, its highest level in more than 16 years, the Labor Department said on Friday.

It was the biggest monthly job loss since the economy tipped into a recession more than a year ago, and it was even worse than most forecasters had been predicting.

In addition, the Government revised down its estimates for previous months by 4,00,000. For December, the Government revised the job loss to 5,77,000 compared with an initial reading of 5,24,000. Overall, it said, the nation has lost 3.6 million jobs since it slipped into a recession in December 2007.

“Businesses are panicked and fighting for survival and slashing their payrolls,” said Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Economy.com. “I think we’re trapped in a very adverse, self-reinforcing cycle. The downturn is intensifying, and likely to intensify further unless policy makers respond aggressively.”

As in previous months, employers in January slashed their payrolls in almost every industry except healthcare. Manufacturers eliminated 2,07,000 jobs, more than in any year since 1982. The construction industry eliminated 111,000 jobs. And retailers, who were wrapping up their worst holiday shopping season in years, eliminated 45,000 jobs.

One modest exception to the bad news was in workers’ wages, which have thus far not reflected the dramatic plunge in employment. Hour earnings edged up to $18.46, up five cents, and average weekly earnings climbed $614.72, up $1.67.

A bipartisan group of senators worked furiously in backroom negotiations on Thursday to cut the cost of the more than $920 billion economic stimulus plan. Senate Democratic leaders said they would await outcome of those talks before pushing for a final vote on the measure.
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