The Stock Market Is For Fools
This is from Rick's Pick's Wednesday commentary..

As any sentient adult will have long since surmised, it is not the economy that is hanging in there, but the stock market. The Dow is trading above 10,000, so how bad could things be, right? Or so the thinking goes. We suspect that this argument is losing its hold on the nation, and that when Brian Williams or Katie Couric mentions that stocks jumped 1% on a given day, most viewers greet the item with a shrug. And those who truly understand the markets just shake their heads, wondering how anyone could be so naïve as to think the stock market is tied in some meaningful way to the economy’s ups and downs. Tied to institutional cash that has nowhere else to go — and to the machinations of half-intelligent machines — is more like it, and we shouldn’t be surprised that the machines themselves are not gifted by their programmers with the cynicism to see the downside of all this whoopin’-and-a-hollerin’ over a scrawny 3.6% increase in profits at Wal-Mart. For, how bad must things be when a bullish blip in the earning’s of the world’s largest discounter rates a 100-point rally in the Dow? Then again, maybe the computers are so smart that 10,000 of them asked that same question and in mere milliseconds improvised the game of “chicken” that caused the Dow’s 75-point sell-off in the final hour. Laugh if you want, but that is exactly how the world’s stock markets are being traded these days.

And people think GOLD is risky?