TraderWise

The beauty of writing a blog is that it's sort of like a diary. If one wants, you can look back to nearly ever day to see where the market was, how you felt about it and what your best guess was about the near-term prospect. And this past year is one for the books, record or otherwise. The only good thing is knowing that I've been fairly consistent and unwavering in my outlook.

For me, the hardest part about learning to save was changing my relationship with money. I understood intellectually that I needed to spend less than I earned, and I could see the debt accumulating as I spent, but money management isn’t just about knowing the math. It’s mostly about knowing yourself. It’s about building self-discipline, and about learning to see money in new ways.

The market is so boring and unrewarding these days that I'm afraid that many of you are going to lose your patience, throw in the towel and revert back to buying mutual funds or index funds. Even worse, you're going to think that the problem is with you or your approach, that everyone else is making money but you're doing something wrong.

I first started writing about the critical area between 1150-1200 on August 7 (wow, doesn't seem like 3 months ago), the day the Index broke through 1000 for the first time since the March 9 bottom and closed at 1010.48, or 7.6% below today's close.

Don't you wish you had some way of keeping tabs on how many talking heads were bullish and how many bearish? Or knowing whether institutional investors were, on balance, buyers or sellers? How about individual investors.

Winning in this game we love means your portfolio out performs a benchmark index because if all you do is match the market, you might as well put your money in an index fund or market index ETF and not even go through the motions of playing.

Here he goes again, lecturing on what he knows not. Of course, I'm talking about Cramer's half-heart and back-handed endorsement of technical analysis and charting (see the Mad Money Recap). Here's what he said:

Ever since the Crash began early last year, most investors have struggled with not having been adequate warned, not knowing what they needed to do, deciding when they should reenter the market if they were fortunate enough to have sought protection in cash. During it all, they should have been gauging their own psyches and the emotions of the market.

I'm amazed at how short the memory is of market participants. It wasn't much more than three or four weeks ago that about all you heard was have the economy "worsening, but at a slower rate", "green shoots", the need for a long-overdue correction and all the sidelines money waiting to be put to work: