I tend to be in hotel rooms when bubbles burst.

On January 6, 2000, I was on the 30th-something floor of the Marriott hotel across the street from the convention center in San Francisco. I was jet lagged and up working even though it was still dark outside, around 5:30 a.m. local time. Just then, Lucent Technologies announced earnings before the market opened. After beating expectations for 15 quarters in a row, Lucent missed its earnings forecast by 18¢. Much worse, it reported a $1 billion drop in revenue. You can't miss on revenues by $1 billion unless something is horribly wrong.

By Brian Hunt

Bullish news from biotech: One of the market’s most speculative sectors is “acting well.” Biotech stocks are a lot like mining stocks. Most of them have no earnings and no real assets… They’re just wild dreams with stock tickers. But every five years or so, the public goes crazy for miracle cures and cancer drugs… to the tune of hundreds, even thousands of percent rallies. The busts that follow are just as spectacular (so trailing stops are vital).

By Brian Hunt

The cockroaches are starting to cover the floor.

Back in November, we ran a chart of the iShares Financial ETF (IYF). This basket of Wall Street banks was down from its peak around $120 a share to $100. A few cockroaches had crawled out of the mortgage mess and into mainstream headlines. I forecasted more would crawl out of the heap before it was all done.

I am sounding a "trading alert" in this column.  The alert is cheap gold.  Dirt-cheap gold. 

As any contrarian knows, the biggest, fastest payoff a speculator can earn is when an extreme situation corrects itself. 

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Take Plum Creek Timber (PCL) for example. Plum Creek is the largest timberland owner in the United States, with more than 8 million acres of timberland.