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July 2010
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Investing and Politics

Doing some of my weekly financial reading – not that it helps me much as I can still make huge mistakes but some of the things I read just hit a real logical spot. like this statement from one of those investment letters you can end up with. “It’s virtually impossible to do your job as an investor without paying attention to politics… As an investor, you need to find ways to get paid by the government.”
I guess if the government is pumping huge amounts of money into something then we might want to pick a piece of that to invest in, on the other hand if they are mad and going to put huge new “laws” (definition restrictions on free enterprise to protect those that won’t protect themselves or open new avenues for political revenue.) we might want to shy away.
I had grand hopes that with the string of days up the market had found some legs and would drift higher with a few hic-ups and flat days but looking at the charts Friday was not exactly a “hic-up”. We hit the 50 day average and bounced down hard? We just needed a flat day to ease through it so we could turn that puppy but no way… All the Averages are trending down now and if we can’t bust the 50 soon it appears we may still be in one long bad Bear of a market?
Suggestions from many are to focus on cash (or cash equivalents), High dividend stocks, and structurally strong stocks like Walmart, ATT, Exxon… the big ones that are already looking at single digit PE values and have hoarded substantial cash the past couple of years. I am not sure they are all safe in this market as everything can go down? Way down?
Keep in mind my crystal ball fell off the table some time back and everything I see for the future is real fuzzy and broken…
It would be better to read the following and make your own decisions:
Bespoke
The Motley Fool Boards
Streettalklive
This site also has a good weekly “free” newsletter called the X-Factor
And of course I check out STocktwits when I can get access.
Yea it is banned from my “bi-monthly” company web access as a “social networking” site.

No matter what, do not do what I did for the first 30 years of my investing life, sit-on-your-hands. Actually I took some really bad advice, invested in crappy stocks, didn’t do my own reading, learning, research, etc… and let my investments just set in the original funds, so my retirement account was stagnant or lost money for the first 15 years then grew as sub-par rates the next 15 years. It has only been after the “wake-up” call of 2002 that I have taken a real interest in what I am investing in and whether it is growing or not. I think I have done better but not by a lot as I started so late and have not yet been able to break all my early “bad-habits”. It seems now, that I have a better idea when I should buy or sell, I just fail to act as I am filled with indecision most of the time. I am not saying to get in and trade like a fool, I am saying, start early to learn about finances, investing, the markets and even politics as they are all very important to your future wealth.

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