Seeking Alpha by Adding Beta

What a week - as soon as I wrote my last blog to take up some positions for 2008, market tanked by 4% and it's on way to crash another 4-5% when it opens up tomorrow. All world stock markets are down from 4 to 10% on Monday and Asian markets are again down on Tuesday. Is it start of bear market (some indexes are already down by 20% - classical definition of start of bear market) or is it another buying opportunity similar to Feb 2007. Stock markets have wiped out all the gains (and some more) of 2007 and trading like end is near. Here are my predictions (I am sure many of them would be wrong in few days:-) Markets will be very volatile for whole of week with triple digit moves on Dow (and possibly Nasdaq) Fed will reduce rates by 50 basis points definately by Jan 30. I won't be surprised if they lower the rates before market opens on Tuesday 1/22 Stock indexes will go down in early week and then recover ground later this week to break even for the week. Dow will test 11800 this

My first blog update of 2008 - happy new year to all of you readers! I was watching the ups-and-downs of market for last two weeks and finally decided to write after I got convinced that we have seen the worst in stock market. Now that Dow is close to 10% down from its peak and Nasdaq is back below 2500, how worse can it get. There are some signs emerging which confirm my theory that we are very near (if not at absolute bottom) of the market. As promised, here is update on model portfolio I constructed at start of 2007 which has returned 15.7% compared to S&p returns of about 5.39% nearly beating it by 10%. Most of the contributors to this decent performance was mutual funds focusing on emerging countries and oil-sector. It's no wonder that my two stock individual stock picks ( Cisco and Yahoo) were worst performers - other than real estate mutual fund. Investment Quantity 1/5/2007 1/1/2008 Rate Amount Amount %Gain UUPIX 15