We've had a huge increase in traffic to this website in the past two weeks and that has slowed it down during peak times of the day. I am working on upgrading the servers and to make some database changes to the site to make it faster. The traffic was due to the interest in our opening members only part of the site to 300 new people on October 1st and of course the stock market meltdown.

I'm writing this around 6:00 AM and the market futures are up this morning following yesterday's 777 point drubbing of the DOW, which came after the House of Representatives voted no against the Wall Street bailout package. We are in a pure crash mode in the market.

On Thursday right before CNBC reported on rumors of the bank bailout plan, Ben Bernanke was meeting with lawmakers and selling the plan to them. Inside a conference room that is part of Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi's office he was meeting with the Congressional leadership.

On Thursday the DOW fell over 300 points. I made a killing on my short stock trading positions, but gold stocks fell hard too. Luckily I got stopped out for a small loss the day before, but nonetheless I don't like seeing gold and commodities drop at all here.

A US hedge fund, the Ospraie Fund, has partly been responsible for the selling pressure in commodity stocks in the first few days of September. The fund is part owned by Lehman Brothers and had assets of $2.8 billion in the beginning of August. The fund lost 26.7% in August and sent a letter to investors saying that it was going to shut down.

We just had the summer rally. You may have missed it, but the S&P 500 managed to finish the month of August up a whopping 1.1% while the Nasdaq ended with a gain of 1.8%. You might detect some sarcasm here and there is a bit. You see despite the lack of conviction in the market action many people are calling for a new bull market in the financial media and on TV.

I just put together a special video showing you how I use TC2000 to look for stocks. Unfortunately the video didn't come out as nice as I would have liked, but I still think it gives you the idea of how the software works - and more importantly how I use it. To watch it go here.

After falling 40 dollars Monday morning and dragging the HUI down 20 points there are some short-term technical signs that gold may be near a bottom of some sorts. First gold finally fell down hard one morning to start to catch up with the steep drop we have seen in gold stocks.

Contrarian analysis. That's a big investment buzzword that gets thrown around a lot. You see most people are wrong at important market turning points. People have a tendency to get excited and buy at tops and then ride their positions all of the way down and sell them at the bottom.

I did a podcast call with Matt Frailey to talk about gold stocks and the broad market. To listen you can right click this link and download the mp3 file to your computer:

Podcast mp3 file - Matt Frailey and Mike Swanson talk about the broad market and gold stocks.