Am I a stock bull? Yes for the right stocks. I won’t sell my long term holds for another 20 years unless their fundamentals change. For my trading account I added new money in May and am up 13% after Friday on those picks. Just one loser (CAT). Still scratching my head how SLB loses 11% in one day after great earnings, but I’ll chalk it up to the sell on the news crowd. I never trade during earnings season unless it’s a stock that gets crushed for no reason and their long term propsects are still intact. SLB just got ahead of itself. I own CAT and am getting a little disapointed in them. Their comments really triggered the sell off and they did that exact same thing last qtr. I may buy S&P puts prior to their January announcments because their CEO seems intent on issuing negative economic statements in order to cover his ass over poor results.
Overall, I think the Fed will continue to cut rates, and I was actually happy about the sell off for that reason. If we go to new highs prior to Oct. 31 Bernanke will have no ammo. The market is now pricing in a 1/2 point cut.
I beleive the weak dollar will help multinationals, and I think there are some undervalued tech plays out there (EMC). India and China still have an enormous amount of infrastucture to build out and they have an up and coming class of consumers that had no access to even telephones just 5 years ago. Over the next 10-20 years there will be tens of millions of new consumers for cell phones, computers, TV’s etc. and the dominant tech suppliers should thrive.
For now I’m avoiding banks and homebuilders like the plague although there will be tremendous buys at some point in 2008 once we see who survives. I own small positions of puts on both groups.