Market Review and How to subscribe this blog, 6/26/2008

What a difference a year makes! Last year this time, the inflation was low and the economy growth was robust. But right now, the astronomical energy price (and looks like it is going even higher) has finally dragged down the economy. It has caused the price to go up in almost everything we use and eat. Higher inflation coupled with the lingering effects of the credit crunch and the burst of housing bubble, the economy is heading into recession. Some may say we are already in recession and it does feel like it, isn’t it? With the Fed keeping the interest rate at 2%, it is very hard for them to prop up the economy while keeping inflation in check.

All the major U.S. stock indices started the year with a sharp drop and then turned around from their mid-March low. The rebound seemed to be gaining traction heading into mid-May to establish an up trend. However, the consolidation failed to hold up in June, and it looks like they are going down again to test the March low. The DIJIA stands at 11453 after 358-point drop today with a loss of 13.7% for the year so far, and the NASDAQ is at 2321 with a loss of about 12.5% (ouch!).

Because of the uncertainty in the general market and lacking of longer robust up-trend, most our positions in the SSPP model portfolio and nSSPP model portfolio so far this year did not last more than 3 months. From our trading log, our positions usually incur loss if they were held less than 3 months because the system was designed to profit from the market trend that last more than six months. Please note that I added nSSPP rankings this year and have not optimized the trading threshold due to its short history. For the industrial sectors and international sectors, everything related to energy is in the forefront due to higher price of oil. They fared better than the general U.S. market, which can be seen from our holdings in Select, ETF, iETF, and sETF model portfolios. We currently hold FNGX, ILF, EWZ, IEO in these model portfolios respectively.

I started to publicize my blog site last week. You can access from the link in the side bar. The blog allows me to share my view and comments of the market more freely and more often. Remember the FEMKX timing model based on the stochastics? I intentionally took it out from this site at the beginning of the year because it is shorter term orientated and does not fit into the AMI ranking system. I have posted that timing model in my blog site and you can see that it has done a decent job in this market condition. You can even subscribe to my blog site so that you can find out my recently update without waiting for my e-mail or visiting my site.

If you are curious to know, I have not got paid from Google for the Ads in this site. You need to click often so that I can accumulate enough earning :->.

I have provided RSS feed subscription in the side bar of this blog. RSS feed allows user to automatically receive the update in their bookmarks from the website without physically visit the site. It is very popular and widely used in blogs and news sites. In order to take advantage this great service, you need to have the news reader or live bookmark capable browsers. IE 6.0 unfortunately did not support the live bookmark, while Firefox and IE 7.0 have these capability. My yahoo, My AOL, and Google Reader all support the RSS subscription.

It is very easy to subscribe the RSS feed. Just click the RSS icon in the "Subscribe Now:" section in the side bar. It will take you to the subscription page where you can select the reader you use. If you do not have the reader, you can click the "View feed xml" -->"live Bookmarks" --> "Subscribe Now".

Now, every time I update my blog your reader or bookmarks will automatically update the feed.