ArtfulDodger

Roger Wiegand: After Bitter Winter, Brace for Spring Meltdown

Sell the US; buy China. The government has plenty of cash, no debt, and is interested in seeing the nation's businesses grow--not stagnate.

Long: CHL; HNP; CEO; PTR; SOHU; NTSE; YZC

Is It Time to Buy? What History Shows

Mr. Mickey:

Good overall analysis. Thank you for your work.

There's far too much talk about bottoms and how long this downturn will last. How about some talk about great companies selling on the cheap.

If you think their earnings are too high now and will be cut later, discount them 15% and work from there. That's what I've been doing for forty years in down markets and economies, and it works, because it puts you in stocks that have a lower downside risk than most.

Companies with great balance sheets and great products and great management will come booming out on top of the current mess.

Forget about bottoms and such nonsense; testing lows and other busted-out terms.

If you have the money available to invest, put it to work and forget about the ups and downs and one-day news events that the 24-hour financial media pump up as important. Most are not, especially over the next year to 18 months.

By this time you can rest asssured that most every bit of bad news is priced into stocks. Oh yes, there will be some surprises, and traders will jump and hop and holler and scream; but a day or two later a new boondoggle will be riding the horizon as hard or harder than the last one. And on and on and she goes as long as the media are negative and economic numbers can be searched out to be bad.

But the management of good companies with plenty of cash and little to no debt will march right ahead building their product lines, cutting out the deadwood, building out where they need to when things are cheap — in full anticipation of the boom to come.

It's a law, you know: the bigger the boom the bigger the bust, and vice versa.

Nokia (NOK), Cisco (CSCO), CF Industries (CF), France Telecom (FTE), Huaneng Power (HNG), Pfizer (PFE), 3M (MMM), Statiolhydro (STO), Taiwan Semi (TSM), Frontline LTD (FRO), & United Tech (UTX) are just a few of the reasonably priced great companies that will come out of this downturn in better shape than their competitors.

I own these. And I believe they can weather the hell fire the world is going through and when it's over be sitting in even better positions than they were when the match was first lit that has scorched our financial world.

This ought to be a good enough spread of companies that the wild-eyed Obama's leftist programs can't get to the lot of them. I hope!