Tuesday, July 20, 2010

I never think there's anything a guy can do that I can't

I was thinking tonight about determination. A while ago someone told me I was conceited for saying something on email. The details are not important, but it got me thinking about how much confidence we place in our abilities. Me: I tend to be competitive, and also very anal about things. If there was an easy way of doing something without understanding it, and a hard way that did, I would most likely pick the hard way. It's more important to me to understand the principle of something than to get it right.

Often times people ask the question would you rather be right or would you rather be happy? In a rhetorical way, because the right answer is to be happy. And my answer is, for the most part, I would rather be right. I don't think I could be happy if I knew I was wrong. I know I'm extremely stubborn in this sense, which gets me in trouble, but I refuse to compromise my principles.

Which brings me to the thought that often times I feel very androgynous. I'm very right-brained by nature, and for that very fact alone, sometimes I just feel like more of a guy. My interests are so wide spread, I would feel just as comfortable fixing a car as I would shopping. Whenever I'm with my guy friends, I'm always digging for information from them about things I'm interested in, but have no one to talk to about like: programming, stocks, video games, construction.....etc... And I get annoyed when they don't want to talk about it (because I suspect it's because I'm a girl, even when maybe they just don't feel like it) lol.

That having been said, I'm also waaaay girly in other ways. But I maintain, that there's nothing a guy can do that I can't or wouldn't be better at if I wanted to :D Whether this makes me a femi-nazi, or just someone whose really anal, who would never be good at being a housewife because I'm too curious about how everything works ... I just feel determined about it.

Saturday, July 10, 2010

Where will the market go next?

Last week the 50 day moving average of the S&P 500, dipped below its 200 day moving average. In the financial world, this is known as the "looming death cross". Jim Cramer wrote a funny blog about it here. As you can tell from the graph of the last 10 years of the S&P 500, this has only happened 5 other times, and at least 2 of those times it directly preceded a recession (2001, and 2008).



So are we doomed to be double dipping into another recession? My thought is no. First, we are already in one, and the two times it preceded the recession were relatively good times for the market, which is not the case now. Secondly, I believe that the cross between the moving averages simply signifies change, of any kind, in the market, good or bad. And if I have some time I would like to look into its significance from a time analysis point of view. Both of the times when the "looming death cross" occurred but did not signify a recession, the 50 day MA was able to cross back above the 200 day MA within 1 or 2 months. So, my thought is that that second cross will occur in this case as well within the next few months. If however, it does not occur, we will all have greater things to worry about than markets!