Interesting, ebear that you have folded your hand, largely.
I guess I should be a biit clearer. I've kept the RRSP accounts because those are in trusteeship. What I did was close a futures/stock/options account because I was already in cash there from about the middle of the year, and because I don't plan to trade futures anymore given everything that's happened.
Up to this point I've been an investor in blue chips, and a trader of small and micro caps. I'm no longer an investor because I don't see a favorable reward/risk situation anymore. It's all risk at this point. The juniors tend to run under their own steam, at least in the short run. This is especially true of gold miners, so I still see some advantage to being there, although you have to be much more selective and accept smaller gains, at least for the time being.
My present thinking is that we revisit (and possibly break) the 2009 lows at some not too distant point and I want to be prepared when that happens. We already have a chart for the future of the Dow. It's the Nikkei index from the last 22 years. The US is following the same course as Japan post the real estate bust: keeping rates low, and essentially looting the productive economy to support the financial sector, so there's no reason to expect a different outcome.
In the Really Big Picture, I see what we call capitalism and free markets as the product of the Industrial Revolution. As that revolution proceeded, new and better ways to do things resulted in savings that could be reinvested in even better ways to do things. The foundation for all of this was cheap energy, and I believe that era is drawing to a close. It may be gradual, it may be sudden - I don't know - but I see an era of rising costs for the foreseable future which will put a serious dent in investment returns. If you reflect on this, it's the underlying reason for the shift from an industrial to a financial economy ie. the rate of return on productive investment starts to fall as markets become saturated and technological inovation slows, so financial services step into the gap. It works at first, but as credit expands without a coresponding increase in production the amount of debt needed for each unit of growth increases until you reach saturation, which is where we are now.
I have every confidence that a new secular bull will emerge in my lifetime, probably driven by a breakthrough in energy production, but until this financial overhang is dealt with and we get a genuine resolution, including long overdue currency reform, we are just spinning our wheels, and in that case I prefer to pull over, park for a while and just take in the scenery.
ebear
