Wednesday, June 18^th, 2008:  Woke up singing this morning …  “Doo-da, Doo-da”… and I don’t sing!  Watched the coronation of the Boston Celtics as NBA champs last night … “Goin’ to run all night, Goin’ to run all day” … and loved this epitome of team play.  What a team!  “Celts and Tiger win it all … Oh, de doo-da day”  Yep, I’m on Cloud 9 with Tiger, the role model for the world, & the Celtics, both winning!

UPDATE ON THE STOCK MARKET.  Another rough, rocky early summer bear market day in the stock market yesterday.  The stock market media and their mostly, bullish-biased guests still searching far and wide for catchy ideas and some reasons to keep others involved and interested in this “pros-only” stock market.  I mean a market environment or backdrop whereby, for some, the jury remains out on whether the bad news is pretty much all out and Mr. Market is all done factoring it in and is now ready to morph back into bull market mode.  Rationalizing that the credit crisis is over, there’s no recession ahead and that rising inflation will soon recede.  Let me respond to that with a “Sure Carm!” as we used to say as kids when we didn’t believe for a second what was told us.  Today, what’s being told or fed us is called “spin.”  Anyhow, I don’t believe any of the above, that the credit crisis is past, that there’s no recession lying ahead and that we have no inflation problem now.  I liken all this rationalizing to stock market impatience.  Market players and the financial media wanting to get past all bad news, now, immediately.  But, hey, it just doesn’t work that way.  Economics and economic trend changes take time, lots of time.  My reading, reading and more reading tells me that today’s bullish view is rationalizing and is normal investor psychology about 1/3^rd of the way through a bear market, the stage where investors still cling to, believe in the bull and thus mentally fight and rail against the stark fact that a bear market has begun.  Schwartz View:  Yep, I see yesterday’s down day, led by the once again weak financials, being just a normal day in an extended bear market, a bear market spawned by a boom gone bust, and now driven by economic causes, the down phase of the business cycle.  For most I would hunker down, position your portfolios to ride out a storm and maybe take a summer vacation this year.  In fact, that’s what I’m doing, unusual for me as I usually just go to the beach in the winter time.  This year Lucy and I are going to find our “way to San Jose” to visit her best friend in two weeks.  (In fact, I have to soon audition stock market books to read on the plane flight out and back).