By James Bone
"What are the top 10 buys in the market right now?" The question, raised by FastCash, our head of investment research, lingered in the stinking hot air.
Who could say? No one knew. And so once again we found ourselves lost, dazed and confused By God we've tried. We've tried to find the bottom.
Doomsday, our bear market analyst, has studied bottoms for years in the hope of finding one. He never has.
Sadly, we're not only a syndicate without a bottom; we're a syndicate without spine.
There is something backboneless about a gang of daytraders who can't even establish a top 10 list, let alone find a bottom.
And so we sat on our bottoms. We did. We just sat there. Wondering what to buy.
Tuesday
Nothing happened. We sat on our bums all day and night, while the world lurched relentlessly downwards. Obama was helpless in the maelstrom.
Meanwhile, the bankers awarded themselves their usual multibillion-dollar bonuses as though nothing had changed - oblivious of the rising dole queues their bovine stupidity did so much to create.
Perhaps the bonuses are an in-joke among bankers? The bloke who lost the most money gets the biggest bonus? We understood, sort of. In the present climate we almost sympathised with bankers.
"Bankers are the most despised species in the world along with ticks and fleas," said FastCash.
"That's not nice to ticks and fleas," said Yogi, our senior chartist.
Doomsday, our bear market analyst, chose this as his special theme talk today: "Macquarie Bank is a special case: they're so arrogant they can't see how much ordinary Australians despise them. They parade themselves as the Great and the Good, on school plaques, in churches and charities. But like most bankers they're just pirates in pinstripes, who'd foreclose on your granny to get a bonus."
MacBank is to halve its profits this year. For that dismal effort, the buffoons in charge still reckon they're worth a bonus. But this is ultimately in the gift of taxpayers, who now underpin Macquarie's survival.
Perhaps we simply ought to bypass the Government, set up a direct debit with MacBank, and pay our salaries directly into bankers' accounts. It would save the cost of gathering our taxes and handing them over to Big Nick, the CEO.
Wednesday
I felt like the proverbial shag on a rock. We gazed occasionally at the markets and turned away in despair. Our superannuation fund, to which we'd declined to contribute for the past six months, has collapsed. That was one consolation. And yet AMP persists in charging us 3 per cent for the pleasure of losing our money.
Thursday
And so we turned to The Inside Trader for hope. The tip sheet is, along with Alan Kohler's Eureka Report, one of the finest in the southern hemisphere. Our stockpicker Drew Watson, quietly known as the Sage of the Southern Hemisphere, agrees.
"I wouldn't get out of bed without The Inside Trader," he said from his bed this afternoon.
We opened the web mag in a state of hushed anticipation. And there they were: The top 10 buys, according to 18 analysts' opinions! They were: Primary Health Care, BHP Billiton, Newcrest Mining, QBE Insurance, Origin Energy, Telstra, Iluka Resources, Sonic Healthcare, Nufarm and Iress Market Technology.
"These are Australia's most popular stocks as determined by the number of brokers looking at the stock and their recommendation," reckons The Inside Trader.
So just to test the theory we bought the lot.
Friday
Professor Steve Keen keeps us alert with his weekly Debtwatch Alert. In fact, I've rarely felt so alert after seeing this week's.
Steve writes: "With the depth of the US downturn now becoming apparent and deflation turning up in the Australian consumer price index data as well as in the USA, there is no doubt that the Reserve Bank will cut rates by at least 0.75 per cent at its February meeting - and possibly 1 per cent or more."
Indeed, the Reserve Bank did just this.
"While I welcome this cut," Steve adds, "neither rate cuts nor fiscal stimuli will be enough to avoid a serious recession - and probably a Depression."
That cheered everyone up.
Steve seems to be hankering for a Depression, so loudly has he pinned his professional cred on one.
In fact, Steve can be so depressing he makes Doomsday - never one for happy-go-lucky projections - look like Julie Andrews in The Sound Of Music.
Prof Keen hates the banks. He even draws on old Karl Marx, his economic hero, in ripping into the bloodsuckers: "The credit system, which has its focus in the so-called national banks and the big money-lenders and usurers surrounding them, constitutes enormous centralisation, and gives this class of parasites the fabulous power, not only to periodically despoil industrial capitalists, but also to interfere in actual production in a most dangerous manner, and this gang knows nothing about production and has nothing to do with it."
Karl didn't stop there: he urged us all to rush out and slaughter the bankers. A little extreme, perhaps, but I can already hear Prof Keen sharpening the machetes.