The Bank HOLIdays and taking stock

With the long holiday (20/03 to 23/03) that all market participants are facing, it is a good time to 'take stock' of the situation that nayainvestors could be facing

1. You bought gold/ gold BEES as suggested by NAYAinvestor - you would be sitting pretty on the strong holdings or it would be the perfect hedge for your underperforming portfolio
2. You are still looking for an opportune moment to enter the mayhem that is the stock market
3. You did enter the market with equity positions and consequently have burned you fingers (hopefully to a small extent only)

So what should you do in each of the positions???
Well the one thing we have never professed to be is a site / blog attempting to tell you how to run your investments, instead we plan to put in front of you the situation, our reading of it and also try to read between the lines that you see daily and then let you make the informed choice... sounds good??

Stunning occurences of the week
Bear Stearns getting bought out at less than 10% of its market value and that too with FED sponsored money - is it a desperate measure or are they trying to build investor confidence by providing the sponsor amount??

LB results: 57% decile in First Quarter Profits
Lehman’s first-quarter profit equates to 81 cents a share, which is significantly ahead of the consensus analyst forecast of 72 cents and sent the group’s stock up 46 per cent to close at $46.49. However, the share price jump, from $31.75, followed declines of 15 per cent and 19 per cent in the previous two trading days as Bear Stearns’s firesale to JPMorgan was hammered out. Bear Stearns was unable to meet a surge in margin calls by its creditors late last week as the credit crunch continued to escalate. After the Bear Stearns sale, Lehman had been among the group of Wall Street firms viewed as most likely to follow suit, in large part because it was the biggest underwriter of mortgage-backed bonds last year and owned $80 billion of them at the end of November.

Probability of lower earnings from companies for this quarter (awaiting the results season - and how each result is going to change the fortunes of traders/speculators and Investors is a big learning that naya investors should attempt to take away from this season. It is a time when we will notice how deviation from an expected value hits/props the price of a stock either way.