Last Night I posted that Fear and Greed were Upon us, specifically:

I would love a big gap down, but the market rarely makes it easy. Probably an up open, and a woosh. If that happens, I have my buy list that I will try with a fixed amount of capital.

I was watching the market from my iPhone in Silicon Valley all day in meetings and there were a ton of fast selloffs from the highs but it looks like we closed at the highs for the most part. Oil and Gold were also down big. The banks have written off everything but their kids at this point.

Leaning too hard on the negative side after this massive financial selloff can get you crushed. If you are extremely bearish, be patient and don’t rush it. There are lot’s of good setups to ease into.

There were some great long trades this morning. I only doubled down in VMW and added some SPYDERS (SPY). Both stormed higher off their lows. I was ecstatic to see my Hansen’s medical finally show some strength.

The most ardent bulls have been caving. That had to happen. You also have some pretty good points to stop out as were have banged these lows hard for a few days.

Any deeper price selloff in the indexes will be trouble, BUT, really step up the fear meter which will be good as well. That’s why if I was a betting man I think this is a tradeable bottom.

Hope you had a great day. I did.

Disclosure – Long VMW, SPY, HNSN.

It’s easy to look back and see what you were thinking and what you were planning.

A few days ago I laid out a quick plan and thought process for the market . I thought we needed a quick 600 point drop in the Dow (5 percent woosh). It happened much quicker than I thought, but I was prepared going into the selloff and had my plan for the ‘what if’.

A plan does not always work out so well, but over time, plans make you a better more focused trader and operator.

If you invest, you should keep a journal or start a blog. It does not matter if anyone reads it, but I guarantee it will improve your thinking at the very least and likely, your trading.

Idiots are in charge.

They will freak you out at exactly the wrong time.

Every ass in the world is now pulling shit out of their archives about how they predicted this subprime disaster. Everyone was right…ya right! The inmates are running things.

Here is a great post and link from Eddie at Crossing Wall Street .

Read it.

Personally, I would replace the whole shebang with PRICE. You could have been on MARS, returned two months ago and blindly seen the subprime and homebuilder runs were over and still made a fortune. They were already down 50 percent. We are talking two weeks ago.

Screw calling tops and bottoms and being early. Like Eddie said in his reaction – ‘Sometimes smart people do things that aren’t so smart’. Like my idiotic trade in homebuilders a few weeks back. I thought they were overdone. Key word – ‘THOUGHT’. That’s for assholes. I took my loss – thank goodness.

Be late and be right and manage your money. Enter strong trends and don’t stand in front of them. Go with them.

News and opinions are useless.

Today they announced a $26 million financing led by Allen Co. Stock is up 20 percent and has the room to retry and execute.

Should be interesting.

It’s Canada day today so be nice to me. I am a simple ‘hoser’ EH!

I am looking at some interesting opportunities all month in Toronto and hopefully have some great ideas to share soon.

Tonight, it is further playing out as usual. The rise, the distribution, the fall and the denial. Through it all, shameless promotion and lies. In the end, millions of small shareholders will own 100 share lots of Beazer that their broker sold them on ‘Value’. They will replace the thousands of insiders and bankers that created the paper during the long rise.

The uptrend ended a while back.

It was time to take Beazer off your screen 40 points ago (unless you truly know how to trde and short stocks and do it for a living).

So many great lessons in just this one stock chart:

You don’t have to catch the beginning of an uptrend or downtrend to make money.

“Don’t trust Whitey” (in this case…any investment bank)!

BTW – great post from the Chairman on the subject of ‘The Beaver‘…I mean Beazer.

I live in a city with 300 plus days of brilliant sun. It is powerful enough to piss me and 5 million Phoenicians off for 4 months in the summer so there must be a business opportunity.

People have been moving South and West chasing the sun for generations. Should we not be tapping it’s GOODNESS?

I like the Solar market for the main reason that it makes sense. The Global Warming issue is so political that it scares me (we had a global cooling scare just 30 years ago thanks Andy ) from an investing standpoint, but a solar group of stocks is something I am considering.

The stocks mentioned in Wallstrip today are First Solar (FSLR), Ascent Solar Technologies (ASTI) and Trina Solar (TSL). My cursory review of the stocks in the sector show a lot are newbies to the public market and not for me.

I wait at least six months for a stock to be trading before considering pouncing on an all-time high.

Evergreen Solar (ESLR) has been around much longer but way off it’s all time highs .

One chip company that supposedly makes chips for this industry is MEMC Electronics (WFR) and it has been on fire relative to the chip industry in general since the bubble burst .

I am interested to learn more. This trend looks here to stay.

I have learned that I am a ’3/4 Full’ guy. I am naturally enthusiastic and although I know guys like Bill and Jim are smart and successul, reading them does not make me money. It actually messes with my head.

It’s good cocktail banter for an asshat party.

Same thing in the entrepreneur world I live in. I have blogged about it somewhere, but I believe it is always a good time to start a business.

I was surfing my blogroll tonight and Brad linked to Dick Costello, CEO of Feedburner , and this great post on entrepreneurship .

Here’s a snippet:

It seems silly to me that one would worry about the general market when starting a company, but obviously it’s a bit of a common theme. So, that led me to wonder what would cause you to have that kind of mindset, and what I think I am really hearing is fear of failure. I think the questions are really “is this environment one in which it will be harder for me to succeed?”, and I will therefore provide a simple answer to this question: Every market is one in which it will be harder for you to succeed. If access to capital is plentiful, then there will be more companies chasing that capital and more well-funded ventures against which you must compete. If access to capital is scarce, however, it will be harder for you to raise money and you will have to endure more investor-friendly terms on financing and have to show more business model progress in advance of further funding. If there are few competitors in your market, then you need to evangelize your value proposition more passionately to the market in order to gain traction. If there are many competitors in your market, then you need to distinguish yourself from competitors more thoroughly. If you’re a first-mover, why should anybody need your new service, if you’re a follower, why should anybody switch to your service?

Lot’s of awesomeness in this post. Dick’s a cool guy and I have chatted wih him a few times. Glad he is blogging regularly.

Now that the dust has settled on the swoooon of the last 10 days, my portfolio is little changed on the year (up a few percent). I was hit, but not that bad.

I was stopped out of nothing despite the massive selloff. Taking profits in CROX, RIMM and AAPL the last few months actually saved me NOTHING. They are all higher than where I sold them DESPITE the correction.

I do think CROX is done.

I added Starbucks, Electronic Arts, International Game Technology and a few gold stocks. I did not add more BIDU (It’s on my CODE RED list). I love the BIDU model, but hate China as an investment vehicle. Too loved anyway.

I totally missed some fast market dips in the Malaysia ETF (EWM) and Webex (WEBX), two stock and areas I like.

All I really notice is that the stocks that sucked before – HOMEBUILDERS – suck worse. That is something I have been saying.

The market is hard for sure. If you did not know that two weeks ago, you know now. It is just not that complicated.

If you were heavy on margin, you should not be. If you owned crap stocks before the swoon, they will be crappier. If you own the strongest stocks like I do, they were whacked and you should be on guard. If you did not add some of the best brands and growth stocks like I mentioned and added, you should not be investing by yourself.

After a drop of almost 700 quick Dow points, the only prediction I will make is…making money in the market will be harder.

I am not shorting like crazy because of a few bad days and I am not ‘backing up the truck’ for bargains.

I am doing less. I am going to nibble on my fave brands and trends and work on other things until trends reassert themselves.

Some great email questions today and I tried to get them all. I love that at least 30 people that watch Wallstrip were emailing about opening their first stock account after this decline and start investing.

It’s time to find the best online broker for young people that just want to keep it simple and not get gauged in fees.

This is fear. This is good. If you don’t own stocks, moments like this is when you start.

If you are scared, stick to the strongest brands going into the fear.

It would intersting to breach 12,000 intraday. It may.

UPDATE – SOLD MY SPY ALREADY (only needed 60 mins for that one.