Today…some housekeeping. First a couple words about what’s going on with the blog…and then I seemed to have rambled into some thoughts on the market and even some baby news….
You might have noticed that we’ve not been as precise in our blog schedule as we have in the past. For almost two years we’ve had a post almost every weekday. And that obviously hasn’t been the case these last couple weeks.
The arrival of our son has certainly added some new twists and disruptions to the schedule. This blog consumes a decent amount of time and I feel like the best way to adjust for now is to scale back the planned blog posts to 3 a week.
This may change in the future, and we might not stay precisely to plan, but I’m going to move forward with the idea of putting up a blog post on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. We’ll probably start that on Monday.
To update a couple of other areas. I’ve got a stack of financial news which I’ve read in the past couple of weeks about 5 inches high, but I’m not sure when another Economic Update video will rise to the top of my priority list given the currently reduced hours of operation which I’m putting in. Of course, client needs must come first, and then it’s a matter of priorizing what’s left. However, I find that the longer I go without shooting them, the more difficult the job is.
I’m thinking that I might scale back the detail and try to focus on only the biggest picture items. We’ll see how that goes when I actually get around to planning the next ones and shooting them.
As to big picture items, the market seems to be falling hard as I write this on Wednesday morning. I have a feeling that the next hard leg down may have begun, or will begin soon. I’ve read some fascinating interviews with famous market timers recently. They have fancy systems for predicting when the markets will make major turns. And each of them is well known because of accuracy in past predictions.
I myself don’t have any such fancy methodology. And looking at what these 3 predictions (which I’ve read over the past 3 weeks), two were early…and one can only be right if the market downturn has truly begun this week.
I have no way of knowing what days the market will turn, but as you know, I feel quite confident in saying the market will turn ugly relatively soon and this may be it. I hope you are making money as stocks fall as we are. At the least, I hope you are not holding onto long positions in the stock market.
I do believe strongly that it will get ugly. I wouldn’t be surprised by one of two outcomes. The first would be a hard fall down that starts soon and reaches into 2011. The second (and I’m sort of leaning towards this one as my hunch) would be a hard fall downward followed by some “heroic” effort by the government before the elections to “fix” the economy. Perhaps the market would be impressed by this and there would be a bounce up for a few months before the reality that our system is choking dawns again and the really hard fall begins in 2011.
Again, I don’t have a fancy prediction system, so I don’t know which of these it will be. But I do feel strongly it will be one of them. I hope your saving/investing methodology is one that has stability in either environment.
Finally, I thought I would update your on the newsletter and my son. Another item on my to do list is the August newsletter. We’re now in Mid-August and I would ideally like to get it out early in the month. Since that didn’t happen, hopefully it will be soon. I’ve had several random thoughts with the birth of my son that I plan to share there, but need to put them all together.
As to Westin, he had his 2 week checkup on Monday and he has gained 2 pounds since birth!! I wouldn’t know what normal is, but the Doc and nurses acted like that was unusual, so we’re excited and allowing him to announce feeding schedules instead of having to wake him every two hours…so indeed, we’re all excited about that!
Thanks for reading this blog, we live in exciting times. I plan to continue to bring you things to think about with regards to stewardship in these times as well as continue to point you towards what the Lord is doing. All areas of our lives will be shaken which are not firmly planted on His Rock!