Oaktree Capital's Howard Marks told Barron's recently, "Everything is cheap. The question is: What is the cheapest and what do you feel more comfortable with?"

The markets continue to bounce along the lows in what seems to be a base-building period.  On Thursday, strong buying came in during the last hour of US trading and this reversed the day's losses, resulting in huge gains.  At the close of the session, the Dow Jones, S&P500 and Nasdaq were up by more than 6%.  Now, it is too early to say whether we have seen the lows of this bear-market, but the benefit of the doubt can be given to the upside for as long as the US markets remain above the intra-day lows recorded on 10 October 2008. 

The Casey Report 

I truly prefer short articles and "cut to the chase" analysis. But the real reason I enjoy reading Richard Wendling's blog is because he was one of the few analysts who called this stock market crash many months before it happened.

A recession. Rising unemployment. Declining personal incomes. Tighter lending standards. Declining interest rates. These are just a few of the headwinds facing credit card issuers, prompting Innovest to predict that bad debt charge-offs will almost quadruple by the end of 2009.

Casey Research – BIG GOLD

Currently, we find ourselves in a mess that many are calling the most serious economic crisis since the Great Depression. If not worse. A mile-high mountain of paper profits has been set ablaze and reduced to ashes, choking investors who put their faith in houses, stocks, or commodities, or… or… just about anything else you can name.