I feel compelled to write a blog about the events of the day. I assume I will be one of the multitudes of individual’s blogging about Egypt, the stock market, and yoga in a single blog. Let us begin with Egypt. Incredible, Fascinating, Mesmerizing. Look I am actually loving the fact that we are on the verge of real change in the middle east. But here is the crazy thing. It wasn’t Hillary Clinton, President Obama, Former president George Bush or 2009 senate maj. Leader George Mitchell who brought about this monumental change. Who do we have to thank for what seems to be the beginning of the end of Islamic fundamentalism? Not very surprising, Jack Dorsey – Twitter founder, a St. Louis Missouri kid who went to NYU and has changed how we communicate. Not very surprising, Mark Zuckerberg – A Jewish kid from White Plains, NY who went to Harvard, created Facebook and changed how we socialize. Definitely not surprising, Steve Jobs, the da Vinci of our generation for creating the tools by which we communicate and socialize. And yes, let us not forget to thank Al Gore for inventing the Internet. These are the true revolutionaries, sans Al Gore, who when all
the dust settles and a real democracy exists in Egypt, deserve Nobel peace prizes. Al Gore already has one. The Internet has changed our lives forever; we are still at the beginning stage of understanding just what that means. Yoga has taught me to live in the moment, to be present. As we watch these momentous days unfold, it is best not to fear the future, but to embrace the change optimistically. While he was not a yogi to the best of my knowledge, our 16th president Abraham Lincoln wisely said, “The best thing about the future is that it comes one day at a time.” Now I am not suggesting that violence and rioting are good things, but change very often is a great thing. Real change such as we are hearing in the voices of the Egyptian populous is revolutionary, it is evolutionary. And it has been driven by the genius of the aforementioned innovators. The most devastating blow the Mubarak government has thrown was not tear gas and rubber bullets; it was shutting down the Internet. It was also the final nail in their coffin. A starving man will kill to eat. A repressed society will revolt for enlightenment. No revolutionary moment has come without a price to be paid; there is no success
without sacrifice. Yogic scripture refers to this sacrifice as Tapas. It is the suffering and pain we must go through for self-purification. Today was a Tapas day for the stock market. There may be a few more to come or not. We will have to wait for Monday to see if there is more Tapas to come. But what we saw today was healthy. We had approached a psychological level in the market. 1300 on the S&P is not a level to be taken lightly. Nor is 12000 on the Dow. We were not going to just glide through these levels. We need to blast through them when the time comes. And we needed a catalyst to sell off from the levels. But now is a time to breathe. Perhaps we need to pull back a bit more. But not much. What we need to do is rest. Observe the world around us and take stock of our current situation. Monday is month end. I do not expect much as funds will neither want to paint the tape to inflate returns, nor will they want to see much more damage done to the strong returns of the opening month of 2011. As the saying goes in the market “So goes January, so goes the year”. We are still in a bull market, but that doesn’t mean you have to be net
long. It does not mean you buy every pull back. I expect a couple of weeks of stagnation and then a real attempt at breaking the psychological barriers in the market. Make sure you are long the market when that moment arrives. Until then, remember what Andrea Boydston famously said, “If you woke up breathing, congratulations! You have another chance.”
Recent Comments