Slowdown is not here - yet
I read an interesting post by David Merkel this morning over at TheAlephBlog
I have been to the USA recently on a business trip, i visited New York and then the Tampa Bay Area in Florida. By not living in the USA permanantly i got the same view David describes in his article. The last time i visited the USA was in 2006 and compared to back then shops these days are empty, car seller lots are crowded (with cars that is, not with people) and Home Depot seems to sell nothing at all if you look at the numbers of customers shopping there at any given time in moment.
But on another note, returning to germany i do not get the same picture. Yes we are waiting on the situation developing at GM, so that we get a decision on what happens to one ouf our own bigger carmakers - the GM daughter Opel - but other than that our shopping malls are still crowded, people are still buying at the local homeowners shop and we still buy ipods and iphones (well, i guess looking at AAPL´s numbers everybody does it around the world, no matter how hard hit by the crisis).
People talk about the crisis and of course we follow the news very closely but it looks like most business is still in normal mode.
Talking to my own car dealer salespersonal bigger companies are feeling the pressure, they cut down on free cars while your own car is in the repair center and their stock has come down to prepare for the future, but amazingly people are still buying new cars in our country. And the rebates are not necessarily great. At least for the moment.
So i think, for germany the crisis has not fully developed, which is a bad thing because as long as people still think, everything is fine, it only gets worse. We will probably see more stock prices going down in germany and we still have to wait until we finally hit the bottom.
As far as trading and investing in this environment is concerned, stops need to stay tight and we can expect more volatility in the markets. So i still have open positions but instead of having 12 open positions in an account i might have 6-8 open right now, and i do tend to get stopped out more often these days.