Poverty level consumers

As a poverty level consumer earning minimum wage, sometimes I'm lucky to get up to 40 hours a week at my job, however there is no overtime allowed.

So, because rent would be 60% of my income, and gas 15%, I choose to live with family. I'm lucky they let me stay.

The only thing I must spend money on is my phone bill, gas for my car, and I buy my own food.

I will eventually be required to replace clothing items, tires for the car, and potentially a mechanical part on my car, so that's what I'm saving for.

One rule for online investors.

One lesson I learned the hard way this week is this:

Always keep a large quantity of cash in your online trading account.

It's too easy to invest all of the cash in the account, after all, cash that's just sitting there isn't really doing anything. It seems to make sense to use as much of it as possible right?

Not when you consider what just happened to the market following the disaster in Japan. I had all but $27 invested. The market took a huge dive and it was easy to sell off my big gainers immediately.

There were a lot of opportunities to buy opening up. Monday, the U.S. markets opened extremely low and started climbing up.

When I sold some stock, I didn't realize that funds from stock sales require several days to settle before I can use them again. It takes nearly as many days to add cash from the bank into the portfolio.

So I was stuck with $27 in the middle of a crashing market. By next week when my funds finally get settled, it will be over. Downwad pressure on consumer spending will be applied by gas prices, food prices, increased taxes on alcohol and tobacco, the removal of collective bargaining rights of public sector workers, potentially followed by the repeal of minimum wage increases in some states to compete for business.

The attempt by state and federal governments to balance their budgets will be a fiscal vortex into oblivion.

I digress. Keep your account at least 50% liquid so you can jump in as soon as you see an opportunity.

The Middle East Crisis and the stock market

Something strange is happening. Massive protests are going on everywhere. Despots are fleeing and the U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton recently testified that Libya could degrade into chaos or anarchy. The word Anarchy has been for years tinged with negative connotations because it has been used by the plutocratic institutions as a smear against their opponents.

Wikipedia defines Anarchism as follows:

Anarchism is a political philosophy which considers the state undesirable, unnecessary, and harmful, and instead promotes a stateless society, or anarchy. It seeks to diminish or even abolish authority in the conduct of human relations. Anarchists widely disagree on what additional criteria are required in anarchism. The Oxford Companion to Philosophy says, "there is no single defining position that all anarchists hold, and those considered anarchists at best share a certain family resemblance." -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarchism

It appears that anarchism is currently working in Egypt and other states that have removed their dictators prior to Libya, however, the main-stream media seems to be focusing on the dismantling of hierarchical leadership, and avoiding the anarchist aftermath that seems to be operating successfully due to social media technology.

Commerce in these newly techno-democratic countries seems to be ramping up faster than ever. The old institutions have fallen away, and this has become the biggest threat to the plutocrats in the U.S.

The collective social communication infrastructure in the U.S. is deliberately fractured into small sub-networks, such as Facebook networks. One cannot add networks, one may only change to another network. On Twitter, you may follow or be followed by any number of people from anywhere, however, it becomes extremely crowded and tweets may blow by like a bullet train without ever being read if one follows too many people.

Techno-democracy in Twitter is difficult because one cannot see feetback after tweeting. To organize like they did in Egypt, one must somehow follow a martyr. There must be some martyr in the West to follow, or an organization to follow that is devoted entirely to the free-flow of information and the enforcement of transparency of government.

We can only trust those who are honest about their motives, and since there are no leaders in the world who are willing to be honest about their motives, we can only trust those who are willing to expose dishonest leaders.

What does this have to do with the Stock Market? Take a look at stock prices as they reflect the rising price of oil. Do they appear differently than at the beginning of the War on Terror, the recessions of 2001 and 2008? It's because nobody believes the rhetoric of the institutional investors and their lapdog business news publishers anymore.