$500 Reward for New Brokerage Accounts at OptionsXpress

This is a really great incentive, but time is very short.

If you open a brokerage account at OptionsXpress and fund it by the end of November, keep an average $500 balance for six months, and make one trade, they will deposit another $500 in the account. Now that's worth doing!

Here are the details.

The wording on that page is ambiguous about when funding is needed, so I called them. They did say it needs to be funded immediately to qualify, but they said the funding deadline had been extended to December 1 because November 30 is Sunday. This means you have to do a wire transfer. Might as well go to your bank Friday, just in case.

Welcome to 1987!

This is pretty amazing.

Since October 1, we have essentially seen a slow-motion version of the 1987 stock market crash, declining about the same amount (in the range of 20% on the Dow).

And since a year ago, we have seen a slow-motion version of the entire 3-month top-to-bottom move of 1987, in the neighborhood of a 40% decline on the Dow.

Welcome, ladies and gentlemen, to history. Sit down, take a deep breath, and reflect on what we are seeing. Decades from now, people will be referring back to the "crash of 2008" or something to that effect.

That doesn't mean it's over. My sources are generally looking for even more pain before it's all done. We are seeing forced selling by hedge funds and other overleveraged traders. Each wave of declines triggers more margin calls, which result in more selling until traders are sufficiently deleveraged (i.e., they sell enough to bring their level of borrowed money down to earth).

The Way Of The Moose

It's been way too long since my last post, but I've been really, super busy. However I saw something the other day that I just had to pass along.

If you know where to look, you can get some valuable free investment and trading advice. One of my favorite sites is Decision Moose. Every weekend, he updates his advice on which one of several ETFs to own. He posts his complete track on the site, and it calculates to about 30% gains per year, compounded, using only a few trades a year. That's an impressive record, especially for free.

But even if you don't follow the signals, his weekly commentary on the markets and economy is hugely entertaining, and sometimes laugh-out-loud funny. For instance, from this past weekend here are a few choice gems:

The Moose is not into finding bottoms except during rutting season, and the older I get, the further apart those seasons seem to be. Moreover, in my experience, the more talk there is about finding bottoms, the less likely a fellah is to be presented with one. And you can’t miss it-- everyone is talking bottoms up these days; not just the drinkers.

My thinking is, if an asset appears to be hitting bottom, there are usually several more attractive places to risk your money.

If we are now to assume July 15 is the real-and-final bottom, we're essentially speculating that an economic revival will commence around Inauguration Day, 2009.

Maybe it's just me, but that seems like a stretch, given one Presidential candidate who admits to knowing nothing about the economy, and another whose economic proposals, if implemented, will make Herbert Hoover look like a friggin' genius.

Fact is, the best bottoms are made of bulging red eyeballs, pulsing neck veins, and sweat-drenched dress shirts. Like unicorns, they do not come when you call them, but only appear when all hope of seeing one has vanished. Since the required abject hopelessness and maniacal despair is not yet in evidence, I need more convincing.

So it's not particularly surprising that his signal is currently in cash, and has been since March.

Check out the site every weekend and you'll gain both in money and insights.