It's been about one month since my last drink which I took at the Angel game. I had 2 large beers there and the next day i felt really weird almost like I was going to collapse at one point. i'm not sure what's going on with me but i do know that drinking is not a good thing for me to do right now. For the past month or so, I've felt nervous, panicky, shaky, basically fucked up ever since i had those drinks. After one month of sobriety, I feel a lot better, my symptoms have gone away and I feel almost normal. Before those drinks I had been sober for 2 months. I recently went to Las Vegas with a few buddies of mine, one of whom is sober like me and 2 of whom were drinking like sailors. I was shooting dice for 6 hours and didn't have one drink, only water and diet coke. I'm pretty proud of myself for not drinking because everyone else around me was, in fact i did not even desire to have a drink. I've parlayed my not drinking into not smoking as well. As soon as I came home from vegas 2 weeks ago, i stopped smoking and have not had a cigarette since. Let's keep it going.
Now to the markets. It was another action filled day in the markets with the Dow Jones Industrial averages trading in a 400 point range!! With this kind of volatility, I wonder who would ever want to be a long term buy and hold investor in the stock market. Trusting your retirement money to the whims of fear and greed and political shenanigans and central banks seems pretty darn reckless at this point! Anyways, markets opened up higher as the july jobs report came in better than expected. However, selling resumed which quickly sent the averages to the lows of the day to 1165 on the S&P eminis. It seemed many investors were throwing in the towel, then word came from the European Central Bank that they were going to start buying Italian and Spanish bonds. This was a game changer to many as averages immediately reversed and shot higher like a rocket rising from down 267 to up 100. Averages traded in a range the rest of the day finally finishing 60 pts higher. I went ahead and nibbled some in my long term portfolio buying the most beaten down small cap stocks and foreign stocks. It looks like a bad move at this point as word has just come in that S&P credit rating agency has just downgraded US debt to AA rating which should result in more selling on Monday. Ah well. I've got to admit all this selling is getting to me as I sensed myself panicking at the lows of today and putting in sell orders on all my mutual funds. Strangely enough, it doesn't seem like investors are panicking that much here in America with many looking to pick bottoms and buy dips. I guess the problems in the Eurozone are far enough away as to not cause much concern here in America. I felt the same way until thursday's 500 point drop which really made me feel that there is something seriously wrong in the Eurozone. I believe a lot of the selling that happened this week and especially on thursday was forced selling by European banks trying to raise capital. With this kind of forced liquidation happening, there is no telling how far the markets can go down. The same kind of thing happened in 2008 which resulted in a 60 pct drop in stocks in a short time. Hopefully we don't have to live through that kind of thing again as I don't think I can take it.
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