Monthly Archives: March 2010

March 7th, 2010 – Speed Retirement Webinar

By admin | March 11th | Webinar Transcriptions

Hello everyone, Greg here. It’s 5 o’clock on the East Coast and we’re going to get started right on time. I am not issuing a new trade alert today for those of you that want to know whether or not there is a trade alert being issued in today’s webinar. There is not a trade alert, although I do anticipate one early this week. So, if you just wanted to briefly check in to see if there was a trade alert, there is not a trade alert being issued today. So, those of you that don’t want to stick around right now would rather listen to the webinar recording later. By all means, enjoy the remainder of your weekend. But I do anticipate issuing a trade alert early this week.

The webinar today is going to go over pretty much just what the stock market is doing, all of our positions I am currently holding and you’ll see why when we go through some of the information here that I have prepared today. If you want to ask a question, you can do that at anytime. Simply open up the little chat box in the upper right hand corner, ‘Go To Meeting’ software does have the overlay on your screen. If you click one of those buttons, it opens up the little window that you can type in your question, click “send,” and all those questions will just come to my screen and be waiting for me.

So, let’s jump in and talk about the market. On Friday, the media was spinning the number of lost jobs as good news. Well, lost jobs are not good news in my opinion, and the fact that we had 36,000 and that figure is subject to revision, will be revised twice, that’s not a good news. But the media spun it as such and the market went up quite a bit, and we’ll take a look at that, take a look at what I believe market is going to do from here. But first, from the mailbag, I’d like to go over some e-mails that I have received in the last couple of days and show you what some other people are saying and what some other people are thinking.

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QQQ or QQQQ

By admin | March 11th | Step by Step Movies

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Kiss That Union Job Goodbye.

By John Thomas | March 4th | Daily Commentary, Daily Commentary

Those of you counting on getting your old union assembly line job back in Detroit can forget it.

The recent eight year forecast published by the Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that 4.19 million jobs will be gained in the US in professional and business services, followed by 4 million health care and social assistance jobs, while 1.2 million will be lost in manufacturing. This is great news for website designers, Internet entrepreneurs, registered nurses, and masseuses in California, but grim tidings for traditional metal bashers in the rust belt manufacturing states like Michigan, Indiana, and Ohio.

I’m so old now that I am no longer asked for a driver’s license to get into a night club. Instead, they ask for a carbon dating. The real challenge for we aged career advisors is that probably half of these new service jobs haven’t even been invented yet, and if they can be described, it is only in a cheesy science fiction paperback with a half dressed blond on the front cover. After all, who heard of a webmaster, a cell phone contract sales person, or a blogger 40 years ago? Where are all these jobs going to? You guessed it, China, which by my calculation, has imported 25 million jobs from the US over the past decade. You can also blame other lower waged, upstream manufacturing countries like Vietnam, where the Middle Kingdom is increasingly subcontracting its own offshoring.

These forecasts may be optimistic, because they assume that Americans can continue to claw their way up the value chain in the global economy, and not get stuck along the way, as the Japanese did in the nineties. The US desperately needs no less than 27 million new jobs to soak up natural population and immigration growth and get us back to a traditional 5% unemployment rate. Since the beginning of the year, the US has created a measly 900,000 jobs. The only way that is going to happen is for America to invent something new and big, and fast. Personal computers achieved this during the eighties, and the Internet did the trick in the nineties. The fact that we’ve done diddly squat since 2000 but create a giant paper chase of subprime loans and derivatives explains why job growth since then has been zero, real wage growth has been negative, and American standards of living are falling.

Alternative energy and biotechnology are two possible drivers for a new economy. Unfortunately, the last administration did everything it could to stymie progress in both these fields, coddling big oil so China could steal a lead in several alternative technologies, and starving stem cell researchers of Federal cash, ceding the lead there to others. While the current crop of politicians extol the virtues of education, the reality is that we are dumbing down our public education system. How do we invent the next “new” thing, while shrinking the University of California’s budget by 20% two years in a row? If my local high school can’t afford new computers, how is it going to feed Silicon Valley with computer literate work force? The US has a “Michael Jackson” economy. It’s still living like a rock star, but hasn’t had a hit in 20 years.

China can have all the $20 a day jobs it wants. But if it accelerates its move up the value chain, as it clearly aspires to do, then America is in for even harder times. I’ll be hoping for the best, but preparing for the worst. How do you say “unemployment check” in Mandarin?