A Few Charts in our 'Babson Style'

As regular readers know, we had been regularly sharing 'hand drawn' charts on key market indices for the past five years at least at the site formerly known as Jesse's Charts. We've had to stop doing this and switch to the pre-packaged Stockcharts.com format because eSignal bought Quote.com, which provided the base for our charting. They were determined to add improvements few wanted while discarding key features and functions (such as stability) to which most had become accustomed.

Such is the way of modern American business management, of which Vista and MS Office 2007 are two other sterling examples. Have these fellows ever heard of the phrase "If it ain't broke don't fix it?" Apparently not. Microsoft is particularly annoying and hard to work with as a demi-monopoly that is not afraid to really screw things up trying to gain some advantage over their customers. In that way they are similar to other hotbeds of inbred thinking and incompetent execution, such as the Bush II Administration.

With considerable annoying hand work we were able to update a few of the old charts. Whether we continue this, or do something else, is another matter. But for now, here they are.

A word of caution, the present financial managers of the US seem hell bent on getting their way in the short term, with the long term be damned. Please keep that in mind if you participate in the market fun and games, and try not to get hurt fighting what *could* turn out to be another attempt to inflate one bubble to fight another's collapse.

Watching the charts is worthwhile not to "predict" where things are going, but rather to help keep your bearings when so many others seem to lose their memory and their mental equilibrium, thrashing from one extreme to another. We get a chuckle reading the many predictions people put up on the web, and the way in which they come back and crow about any correct predictions while carefully ignoring their mistakes. The first they tend to carve in marble, and the latter are written in the sand.