Economic recovery and "selling like never before"

[Chester P. Dexter]

jq (and anyone else), you mentioned economic recovery in another thread. I stumbled across this and I trust you and others to help me sift through it since I'm not the most knowledgeable.

Anyone have any comments on this?

http://money.cnn.com/2009/09/10/news/economy/insider.sales/index.htm?postversion=2009091014

[jq26]

My two cents: Could mean insiders don't think we're going much higher. Or it could mean insiders are just hedging their bets after making monstrous gains over the past 6 months. Or it could mean nothing.

People buy stock for one reason: to make money because they think it will be worth more in the future. People sell stock for a variety of reasons, only one of which is because they feel the stock price is going lower. Maybe they're merely rebalancing after indulging in underpriced equities over the past year. Maybe they're upgrading their yachts. Or maybe Goldman Sachs is whispering in their ear that capital gain tax rates are going up and they are selling ahead of time.

I'll be the first one to say that I have no idea. Things are better than they were six months ago. But are they 50% better?

[Ravenous Wolf]

Not too long ago when a co-worker told me that his 401k had been increasing in value, I told him that he was full [EXPLETIVE DELETED]. So later on in the day I decided to pull up my account to see what was going on.

After all, the values had been going down the tubes since forever. I used to like to check it every day and then after a while I would check it only once a week. And after I paid a 401k loan in full, it seemed to have absolutely no impact because the values kept sinking lower and lower. At that point, I decided to give up because the economy has been in the toilet for so long and it will be in the toilet for a long time. I know that there are a lot of people exactly like me and had just given up.

So I check out what the values are later that day and I just about had cardiac arrest. My co-worker almost had to give me CPR.

Of course it will take years for the value to substantially increase but it was so shocking to see very good gains in my 401k portfolio. In fact, I started hunting around for financial news, which is something that I hadn't done for so long because of this non-stop bear market that we are in.

And here is a very interesting article that I found in MSN money explaining that we are on the verge of another bull market because so much of what we are in today is almost identical to the emergence of the last bull market (recession, real estate crash, etc).

Get ready to party like it's 1991

http://articles.moneycentral.msn.com/Investing/SuperModels/get-ready-to-party-like-it-is-1991.aspx

All of a sudden I am now keeping up with financial news and latest updates on stuff. Of course we are nowhere out of the woods but I keep finding more and more interesting updates. And in many ways, I am getting ready to party likes it's 1991.