This is a good post Col.I still believe there is further hedge...

This is a good post Col.

I still believe there is further hedge fund shakeout to occur which could start speeding up again in January when redemptions and withdrawls start recurring. These tend to occur on a quarterly basis. This will obviously have implications for stocks, commodities, oil and FX causing them to continue to overshoot on the downside.

My feel re UMC. I still believe it will hit $0.40 whether a corporate deal is done or not. The current state of the markets mean that rationality is being thrown out the window and fundamentals are also being discarded. Therefore, even if an offtake/ equity arrangement is done, this may have some ST upside to the SP, but over time I believe that the SP will still drift downwards until the market bottoms: which might not be until June/ July next year.

I'm watching Cu, Ni for some guidance as to the bottom. There has been consistent real price bottoms in these commodities going back to 1982: Cu US$2000/tonne and Ni $US$5500/ tonne. If we up these a fraction to allow for the China factor (only a fraction) these offer some idea as to where and when the bottom might be hit IMO.

I think we can expect a fiscal stimulus package from the US early next year (no rocket science in that prediction), but that aside, China has now shot its load and most of the major spending hits have been announced. The problem now is that there is a time lag between announcement and impact on markets, meaning that sentiment will, IMO, continue to drift down.

Depending on who you are and how you look at it, this thing creates some great opportunities for the long term. Agree with Buffett's assessment on Baltic index. Lot of ships parked up.

It's useful, for those that have the time, to revisit previous crashes. This one has a lot of parallels to each of the major ones. Long time to recover. My personal view is that this one bears many parallels to the one of 1973-74. Period of massive growth and high oil prices, and then a crash that occurred over about 22 months if my memory is correct (from top to bottom). It was five years before the market made a new high.

Soros, Col, believes that hedge funds will lose some fifty to seventy five percent of their assets under management out of this. The question is how much has been lost already. And how much is left to come. If there's still plenty to come, there still could be some pain left yet.

BUSH