Death By Data Points This Christmas or "What Doesn't Kill Me Makes Me Stronger"

Here is a dumb question - does anyone not living under a rock think we're not in a recession? We've been getting a steady stream of news about the credit crunch and the global slowdown for the entire year and yet the stock market still gets tossed around by every new data point confirming that "yes, we're in a recession". Notice how I said "tossed around" and not explicity "tossed downward" - emphasis on the difference being that the market is already down huge!

The market has already priced in this recession to the levels of a global liquidity freeze, total banking industry failure and "Depression 2". So why is the market still gyrating so much over every little piddly data point just confirming what any idiot already knows?

Lets take a couple exapmles:

The economy lost 1.2million jobs, with 240K half coming in the past two months. What else do you think happens during a recession? These numbers look more like every other recession - in fact they're currently being compared to the early 1990's recession. Who didn't expect this?

Or how about this one - car sales were down by the largest levels seen in 50 years - take away the credit to buy cars and combine it with the fact that Detroit hasn't been making a car anyone would really want to buy without a juicy financing handout and what do you get? Yep - nobody is buying cars now that they're no longer being given away!

How about the "Ad Spending" data points where News Corp and Disney came out and said - companies are slashing their ad budgets. Did you expect them to double their ad budgets? I mean, really!

These all seem obvious after the fact, so let's test our predictive meddle a bit on the retail sector this winter...anyone really think the toy manufacturers are going to come out and post another record year for the Tickle-Me Elmo or that sales will be booming for the latest Madden video game? I think not. In fact the entire retail sector has priced this expectation in already as well, yet as these companies report they'll all get trashed even more as panic punishes them for this news twice!

And then there is Mastercard which is going to tell us how big ticket item charges declined and overall spend is down. Duh! This won't stop Coach from getting shellacked AGAIN! So what does this all mean?

It means that those people with resolve strong enough should by some stocks for their kids and family this Christmas. Yep, no batteries needed, no assembly required, just Buffet-like guts. As your investment advisor had you buying all the way up the last bull market, this is actually the time to be buying - snapping up good companies when the news is grim and then let every schmool out there take your holdings up once the data points start to tell us that - surprise, surprise we'll start to come out of this recession.

If you have any money left, start buying now - I see huge sales, and not in the malls this Christmas.