Lot of ya'll have gotten fooled by headlines like "GM Emerges from Bankruptcy" and have immediately proceeded to buyin up shares of GMGMQ. Don't do this, you are making a very bad sucka mistake. What has emerged from bankruptcy is not the GM that went Chapter 11; that company was renamed to Motors Liquidation Company in June, and trades on the Pink Sheets under the symbol GMGMQ. What has emerged is a new company, mostly funded by the U.S. government, called General Motors Company. This new company will be buying up the old assets (like employees, plants, etc.) from Motors Liquidation Company. The money from this sale will go to paying back all the creditors of Motors Liquidation Company, and will not go to the shareholders. GMGMQ, like most stocks whose symbols now end in Q, is dead investment weight...

Where u been trademaster J?
Beeyitch please. With the market haven gone all whack, I had to go out and get a real job. Shit, man, workin fo a livin ain't easy.

That said, today imma give you my 2 cents (all I have). This here is trademaster j's recession survival kit. What to invest in during a recession?:

• fancy threads. Suit prices be all down. Jump on the next sale. When shit start's turnin around, you'll have some better leverage fo that next promotion.
• the job. spend time learnin how to do your salary job better, or your boss' job.
• yo family. No matter what happens, you want a warm home to come home to, you feel?
• smart groceries. Bread and spaghetti help yo money go a long way. If you buy perishable items, eat them first! Don't be a fool and let that shit go to waste. Canned food, an old favourite.
• Switch from dank to schwag. No need to be tokin the deep shit when your portfolio's in deep shit.
• your happiness. Don't let shit get you down. Yea, maybe yo portfolio be splat or your job be shat, but you got your whole life ahead. Hold your chin up and invest in shit that makes you happy, a good book, some fourties, gym membership, whatevs.

In September of last year, the SEC ammended the naked short selling rules to emphasize a strict enforcement. Here's something you may see from your broker at some point:

Sup ya'll? You probably know that this is a dangerous time to be buyin up stocks. Volatility is through the roof, and going long aint so strong in a bear market. So what do you do when you want to make a gamble on a company you think is fundamentally wicked good? I'll tell you what I often do; it's called a covered call...

A friend linked me this wicked flick about some bankers dukin it out with some consultants on wally ave:

This month, shit's hit the fan and the disastrous effects of poorly regulated free market have come to light. But apparently, the brunt of any new regulation of our economic sectors has fallen on the heads of peepz such as myself and my fellow trademasters. Several days ago, the SEC ordered an immediate halt on the short sale of finance industry securities because the shorters "...threaten fair and orderly markets". Apparently, us tradin folks are threatenin the poor wittle bank executives out there who are just tryin to make an honest livin taking the money of the American people and investin it in risky loans and insurance policies.

Obviously, it was our junglist shortin that was responsible for these banks crumblin. Us short sellers magically got these banks to lend money to people who have a history of not paying other people back and at unheard of interest rates. Us short sellers somehow made these institutions guarantee each other's debt with credit default swaps. Us traders must have been the ones to lobby congress to pass the Gramm-Leach-Bliley act allowin insurance companies to dabble in mortgage and start bundlin up debt instruments so little banks could play with toys they didn't know contained lead.

FUCK NO, AND FUCK YOU

Us short sellers shorted the shit out of these criminal loan sharks because THEY DESERVED IT. You wouldn't regulate their snarky asses, so WE DID IT FOR YOU. We did our research, saw fault in the balance sheets, we saw their dirty hands trying to hit up the lower class for cash moneyz, and we didn't like it one bit. We saw them pull in foreign investors to rally their stocks to hide the righteous negative sentiment and make us feel pain when our broker liquidated our accounts on the resultin margin calls, but then we went right back to our brokers and shorted you again. They brought their smiling CFOs to CNBC and Bloomberg TV to tell us that everything was just fine, and that those pesky shorters are trying to "manipulate" the market and hurt those trying to make an honest living. Let me tell you a little thing about an honest living... the working class of yesterday's street who put their retirement accounts into your grubby hands to invest in the future of America, are you going to tell them that stock traders were responsible for what these bank-daddys did with their deposits? Are you going to tell the average American that they can no longer afford to travel to another country because it was the short sellers who diluted their currency so much to pay off the write-downs of these fat pigs.

Call us traders "evil" and "manipulative" for bringing Lehman Brothers' stock down 60% in one day, when the company's real balance sheet actually should have had the stock trading at 0. You can call it panic selling, you can call it a fire sale, you can call it an act of treason, but fuck you, it's called a correction. A correction that wouldn't have to have been made if you'd only had the balls to require these banks to disclose their investments, if you had maybe stepped in and said "woah now AIG, you're going to insure a whole sector against the possibility of loans defaulting? Isn't that, I don't know.... crazy?".

Shorters help prevent bubbles in sector valuation from occuring. By trying to curb this bubble's pop by setting ourselves up for the next bubble, you are not just committing an injustice to us traders, but you are setting up real investors for a wretched crash down the road. When I say "investors", I mean the peepz out there keepin it real, using mutuals in their IRAs and 401ks with their hard earned blue colla dolla. Their funds are tied up in instruments that get fucked by these bubbles you help create when you turn to us traders with the evil eye and turn the other cheek to the men with suits and grins.

If you want to get any of the good juice from regulatin the likes of myself, try something more productive like reducing institutional margin leverage, or taxing speculative trades on the commodities that people of the world need to survive, like soy, rice, and that sticky dank crude oil. But above all, don't be hatin.

Trademaster J is shakin in his boots. This morning could yield major badness in the market. A few hours ago, Lehman Bros declared bankruptcy and the effects of this could be ripplin. The last time I remember the major bankers getting together on Sunday (exceptin for golf) was the collapse of Long Term Capital Management in September of 1998. But in the case of LTCM's collapse, the banks were in a position to step in and swallow the money shot, this time, not so much. Will lettin Lehman fall start a domino in the barrio?

Gas prices have got all swoll and drivers takin the toll. But Trademaster J has something that might help insure your portfolio against the woes of gassy foes...