On Thursday the DOW fell over 300 points. I made a killing on my short 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. The bear is acting worse than even I had expected and is now smashing everything in sight.

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.

Dave Skarica and I released a podcast after the close today in which we discussed gold and gold stocks. To listen download this mp3 file right here. If you have trouble put your mouse on the link hit right click and then save as and you can listen to it off of your computer.

Andy Emerson and I just put together this video on gold stocks. The last video we put together was very timely, because we did it in May two weeks before the S&P 500 peaked and warned people to get out. Now we have a message that is just as important when it comes to gold stocks.

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.

Some bad stuff just happened to me. You think of disasters as
something that happens to other people, but sometimes they
do strike at you.

One guy almost died, another man got put in the hospital and
couldn't remember his name. It was like hell opened up. For all
of the details go here:

Hell opened up: details and photos.

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.

How I use TC2000 technical analysis software to scan and sort through stocks

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.