One of my (few) pleasures in life is the newspaper. Every morning, way before the sun comes up, I stumble out to my driveway (puppy clenched under one arm) and pick up the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. Thumbing through the paper, totally alone, while eating my breakfast is usually the high point of my day.

Over the past ten days, however, I've had the same situation with papers as I've had with Slope comments – – – I haven't had time to read any of them. They've just been stacking up.

I officially threw in the towel today. I got a big cardboard box, wrote "Financial Crisis 2008 Newspapers" on it, and shoved all the papers inside. Maybe in the year 2035 I'll crack it open and reflect on the recent insanity with a different perspective.

Comments, on the other hand, I still haven't sacrified. Although it'll probably take me hours, I want to go through them all. Why? Several reasons.

• It's a great source of ideas
• I enjoy looking at the links and articles people mention
• Most importantly, it helps temper my disposition; I find the opinions here give me a much broader perspective. Did you think about this? What about that? Have it looked at it this way? I'm much rather challenge my thinking that just plunge ahead.

As for the market, it's tough right now, because it's not in the "slam dunk" state that I like. Energy (and the EUR/USD), for instance, strike me as a no-brainer. Same with gold. The indexes, however, could go either way. If they decide to go up, there's a huge amount of "up" that could happen. That scares me. Any "down" left would probably come with a short, sharp drop as opposed to more day-by-day bloodletting.

But, as Colonel Kilgore says, "Some day this war's gonna end." In a way, I'm going to miss it.

The attempts by buyers to establish a short-term base have failed. I got out of my QLD and SSO positions (the former at a small profit, the latter at a small loss) and at once again 100% in a bearish position.

If anyone's interested in buying puts on GS (because Lord knows it's a criminal act to short it now), the stop price I'd suggest is 152.35. Quite a ways from here, yes, but that's what the chart is telling me. I picked up a couple of November puts myself.

Funny how some things never change.

John D.
Rockefeller, Sr.: "Believing that fundamental conditions
of the country are sound and there is nothing in the business
situation to warrant the destruction of values that has taken
place on the exchanges during the past week, my son and I have
for some days been purchasing sound common stocks. We are continuing
and will continue our purchases in substantial amounts at levels
which we believe represent sound investment values." (Oct.
30, 1929).

Warren Buffett, commenting on his $5 billion investment in GS: "Goldman Sachs is an exceptional institution. It has an unrivaled global franchise, a proven and deep
management team and the intellectual and financial capital to continue
its track record of outperformance." (Sept 23, 2008)

For the record, here's how the sound common stocks worked out for the Rockefellers:

I like the NASDAQ 100 for a bullish play right now, with a stop at 1645.58 (yesterday's low).