***SALE*** Bargains Galore/ Get 'em While They're Hot!

Phoenix, You're spot on! Consumer goods producers like Johnson & Johnson, Proctor and Gamble, Costco brands of household goods, foods and staples like Campbell Soup (even McDonalds), are all good investments in good time or bad.

Earlier in the day (no telling what happened at the end) beer and tobacco shares were up.

I think liquor is a good investment right about now.

I'm with ci on all of his suggestions. That wonderful man has become my new financial advisor. (I could do a lot worse.)

I've been trying to get CI's take on Apple for the past couple weeks now. It's at half the price it was only two months ago.

But CI keeps scaring me from making a move on it with his damned sensible advice.

The last thing I will do is buy stocks. Doing that is what caused my retirement losses to my 401k in 2003-2005.

Sooooo --- in my cabin in the woods, I'm stashing the following:

water
beer
pot plants
popcorn
flour
canned goods
preserved veggies
herbs
preserved meats
dog food (for my border collie)

TV and a battery powered DVD player w/ as many 'best of' comedy series as i can find)

Close to our office is a Walmart, and the amount of cars parked outside increases on a weekly basis (I drive by always at the same time). People start
saving money and they start shopping at Walmart.

My wife trusts my judgment and, for me, that's enough! LOL

I recently read that even WalMart was having trouble meeting sales goals.
Their stock was down 6% today.

CI- Just about every stock was down today. I think though, that in the longer view, stocks like Wal-Mart, Costo and Sam's will do very well.

Remember, today was the end of the ban on short selling. The guys with the brass balls cleaned up!

I was in Tampa yesterday, at a mall I seldom visit. The Dillards in this mall turned the entire store into a clearance center. Everything was 50-75% off. The next step is to close the store.For those who don't know, Dillards is a middle of the road store, like Macy's.

He told you to wait, as he expected rotten holiday sales. Probably still does.

we still have a long way down to go, now is not the time to get into the markets. Once we get below dow 7000 go in slowly. Almost nothing is worth the current price.

I agree; those discount/warehouse stores will continue to do well in most economic conditions.

Another change this holiday season will be more sales before the holidays, and deeper discounts after the holidays.

the chains put in their holiday order may at the latest, well before they knew how bad this season will be. They will all need to price very low to get sales, to unload what they have. No one will make any money, not even walmart. The goal will be to lose less than the competition so that they can stay in business. Come feb/march many current chains will be gone.

You're spot on! Most retail business buy for the holiday season six months or more before the holidays, because it represents up to 25% of their annual sales.

bears and bulls make money, not pigs. Ive bought some bottom feeding stock.(Very high quality stocks that have been dragged down by moimentum) They may drop a bit more but Im banking on the upside. Stocks like P&G and IBM have been hurt by nothing more than panic.

I think a prudent investor can begin recognizing opportunities now. Wanna see what railroads can offer?

You are making a mistake, nothing is worth what is was a few months ago, even a business that was fairly valued then and which is doing even better now. The game has changed. This society is losing massive amounts of wealth, the system no longer has the confidence of the people, nothing that the system has to sell will find buyers at anything like the price they were at in AUG........for many many years. How much less the stock worth is the unknown, I think about 40% off the top but there is no way to know for sure. If so that means that IBM is if it is a good company worth 60% of what it was pre-crash. A turkey like GM is worth much less, maybe 10%.

hawkeye, You are right; nothing today is the same as just a few months ago; even for many of us who saw some tanking of the markets. The whole enchilada has changed, because the whole economy of the world has changed. P/e ratios won't mean much, because there is no way to predict what will happen with this financial crisis; some good companies are going to go belly up, while some unexpected companies will show some muscle to survive. The managers of today are at a loss; nobody has experienced this kind of crisis, and there's nothing in the books to learn from.

Some of those companies who saved for a rainy day have always survived the ups and downs of the market, but this is totally new ground. Let's all hope we all survive this one way or another.

firms that tried to save for bad times were raided, almost always successfully, and their assets were off-loaded to the stock holders in the form of dividends or stock buy backs (this was the scam of buying stock at the going rate, thus artificially inflating the price per share, and then issuing new stock, then buying more stock and inflating the price again)

Nobody who was public has the stomach for a depression, and few do for a bad recession, which is a big part of why the entire system of capitalism is now going to go on life support. You still don't understand this CI, the excesses of the last two decades not only undermined firms that will now go down, but also the entire justification for capitalism.