Bear Market Comparisons

NY Times has a cool interactive page where you can visually compare the various bear markets over the past 80 years on one graph to get relative comparisons.

Jim Cramer was [Almost] right!

If you missed it, Jim Cramer made a prescient prediction earlier this week on Today's show.

The bank lending default crisis that put financial firms around the country on the brink of collapse could bring “as much as a 20 percent decrease in the stock market,” Cramer predicted.

Well, he made that public when S&P 500 index was around 1135 pts. Today, the index is down at 910. Which works out to be: 20 percent! Good call Mr. Mad Money! [I write this tongue in cheek since he's made a lot of wrong calls, including not anticipating the market being down 40% since Oct'07: your blogger on the other hand is doing quite well since he is invested in short ETF like DXD and SRS.]

Update Oct 10: I was wrong: my starting point was off by one day. He started around 1053 and today it closed at 899, which is down 15%. If you look at the bottom of today at 839, then it would be -21%, so not too bad after all.

What will happen tomorrow or the next week or next year, it's hard to say. But one thing for sure: economy isn't looking good and I believe we'll get worse before we get better (in fact, I'm anticipating Great Depression 2 or GD2).

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