Then there was the time he nearly cost me my world status: We’d never played together in a tournament before, let alone a world championship. We were huge underdogs to qualify for the finals, but God bless us, we qualified, at which point Warren said, “I can’t do this anymore. It’s so stressful. Tell them I have a business emergency. Tell them anything.” So I go and try to tell the officials my partner has a business emergency—they were furious. We were probably the only couple ever to qualify for a world championship and withdraw without one of us dying.

http://magazine.wsj.com/people-ideas/partnership/like-a-marriage-only-more-enduring/

One of my mentors just told me:

US stock market crash is coming.

Here are the signs:

1. I cannot find undervalued stocks for large cap and middle cap stocks in US stock market using my stock pick strategy. The last time I cannot find undervalued stock was during 2008, then stock market crashed big time.

2…. Investor funds start to flow into US small cap stocks. In a stock market, there are big cap, middle cap and small cap stocks. When the small cap stocks start to rally, that is a sign that the rally is at the last stage.

3. Oil price is at $106 now and still continue to rise. High oil stock is damaging to a lot of industries.

4. Middle east unrest is causing disrupting effect to companies that have offices there or has business dealings there. Nobody know when it will end. And it may spread to other parts of middle east.

My portfolio is 70% in cash now. Planning to sell my Bank of America to raise more cash.

So what can you do when the market is bearish? Trade stocks when you can find good stocks, and trade stocks options with my other mentor’s conservative option trading strategies to continue to make money in the stock market even when the market is moving downwards.

We wish you a merry merry Christmas n a happy new year!

The best of health and wealth to you n your family!

See u in 2011!

Turned out that people who bought them are aliens who are spying on Earth and these aliens had earthy occupations as traders so they could afford the expensive eclairs… Reason for the air drop, their boss up there is rewarding them, and those eclairs are special ingredients not found on earth… LOL

The nine-member Monetary Policy Committee, led by Governor Mervyn King, reduced the bank rate to 1 percent from 1.5 percent. The decision matched the median estimate of 61 economists of a Bloomberg News survey.

The U.K. economy will shrink the most since 1946 this year and faster than any other industrialized country, International Monetary Fund forecasts show. Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s government has given the central bank powers to spend up to 50 billion pounds ($73 billion) on bonds and commercial paper as interest rates lose their potency to aid economic growth.

“We have a deep recession and a credit crunch,” said Michael Saunders, chief Western European economist at Citigroup Inc. in London. “Why wait? The debate is about how the economy can ever recover, and the Bank of England has the answer to that in its hands.”

King will present the bank’s updated economic forecasts on Feb. 11. Minutes of this month’s meeting, showing how the members voted, will be published on Feb. 18.

The Bank of England has now lowered its rate by 4 percentage points since October. The U.S. Federal Reserve has reduced its key rate to a range between zero and 0.25 percent. The European Central Bank will probably keep its rate at 2 percent today.

Fed Measures

King’s next step may be to pump additional money into the financial system. He said Jan. 20 that the central bank will buy “high-quality” assets within “weeks and not months” to ease market strains, a policy in line with similar measures pursued by Fed Chairman Ben S. Bernanke.

Brown and King are trying to rescue an economy that will contract 2.8 percent in 2009, according to IMF forecasts. House prices fell an annual 16.4 percent in January, mortgage lender Halifax said today.

Ford Motor Co. said today it plans to cut up to 850 jobs in the U.K. as demand for autos and commercial vans slumps. As many as 5,000 British companies may file for bankruptcy this year, a report by accounting and insolvency firm KPMG showed.

The downturn is cooling inflation. Consumer prices rose 3.1 percent from a year earlier in December, compared with 4.1 percent the previous month, the biggest drop in the annual rate since records began in 1997. The central bank’s target is to keep inflation at 2 percent.

‘Depression’

Brown said yesterday that the world is suffering a “depression,” suggesting he may increase measures to stimulate the economy. The government has already pledged hundred of billions of pounds to prop up banks, and the pound has fallen 26 percent against the dollar and 16 percent against the euro in the past year, making British exports cheaper.

“There are many stimulus factors in place, cuts in interest rates, various fiscal packages will help,” said Nick Bate, an economist at Merrill Lynch & Co. in London and a former Treasury official. “But given that we’re in a world where many central banks are cutting severely, the ability to fine tune the economy has passed.”

The Federation of Small Businesses said yesterday that recent interest rate cuts aren’t helping companies because they cannot get access to loans. More than two-thirds of small businesses wanted the central bank to keep the rate unchanged, according to an FSB poll. The Building Societies Association, representing customer-owned lenders, also called for no change.

For now, the central bank may still have little choice but to keep cutting.

“The fundamentals are still weak and there is still some scope for orthodox policy easing,” said Ross Walker, an economist at Royal Bank of Scotland Group Plc in London. “It’s preferable to nudge rates further now than to turn to the printing presses.”