Shazbot!

So things are at best struggling and Cisco looks like it is going to wreak some havoc because of the guidance.

After a couple of lousy days maybe the Cisco hit (if it even lasts until the open) can turn around in some sort of oversold-ish snapback. I don't know but fear seems like it has inched up a tad this week.

I saw Louise Yamada on Fast Money (CNBC Asia was preempted, maybe its Golden Week?) and she had all sorts of ominous things to say about the market.

Who knows? We all have opinions but who knows?

One aspect, the only aspect really, that matters about the type of pre-planning I have preached about in the past is the extent to which it relieves having to make decisions when it is hitting the fan. What I mean by this is that in planning ahead what you would do when the bear market comes you make the decisions ahead of time, you simply need to execute them when things are hitting the fan. Not having to craft the strategy now, or a month ago, makes it much easier.

Emotional responses are the downfall of many a market participant. Knowing this it seems only logical to remove the threat of emotion by mitigating it long in advance. I have had roughly the same plan since before this site started and have written about so much that I probably lost readers as a function of the repetitive nature of the posts but now that a bear appears to be a couple of months old you can get some sense of why I wrote about this sort of thing so often.

Any sort of defensive action taken with any reasonable catalyst has probably been a help. Of course the other thing is that bear markets are normal and this bear will end, giving way to a new bull regardless of anyone's ability to know when or how bad it gets first.

I can't begin to express shoulder shrug this evokes because it is just a part of the cycle just like you know that most of the time you are not sick with a cold but you know you will get one at some point in the future or unless you wash you hands 100 times a day or never leave the house (kind of guilty myself, I haven't had a cold in quite a few years; try oil of oregano as soon as you feel one coming) which would be the investing equivalent of just rolling t-bills or CDs.