A week of ups and down

Read this on Bloomberg today and found it very interesting that after a week of turmoil in the financial market, the general S&P index is mostly unchanged. Imagine if you did some panic selling of your unit trusts in the middle of the week, you would have suffered unnecessary losses. Stay the course. 

On the other hand, knowing that when pessimism is high, its the best time to buy if you have the fortitude to hold on. Yet few of us can do it.

No matter how much faculty of idle seeking a man has, the step from knowing to do doing is rarely taken.

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

  

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

S&P 500 Is Unchanged, Wall Street Forever Altered: Chart of Day 

By Nick Baker and Jeff Kearns

Sept. 20 (Bloomberg) -- U.S. stocks were little changed this week.

The CHART OF THE DAY shows the swings in the Standard & Poor's 500 Index that left the equity benchmark up 0.3 percent since Sept. 12. That's the smallest weekly move for the S&P 500 in a month, even as it posted the biggest daily plunges in seven years and the steepest two-day surge since the aftermath of the October 1987 stock-market crash.

The index tumbled more than 4.7 percent twice after Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc.'s bankruptcy, Bank of America Corp.'s takeover of Merrill Lynch & Co. and the government seizure of American International Group Inc. The S&P 500 ended the week by jumping 8.5 percent in two days on the government's plan to purge banks of bad assets and crack down on short sellers.

``We moved around a lot to get nowhere,'' said Douglas Peta, a New York-based market strategist at J&W Seligman & Co., which manages about $20 billion. ``If you were away for a week and just came back and looked at the indexes, you'd say to the person next to you, `nothing happened while I was gone, huh?'''

The S&P 500 added 3.38 points to 1,255.08 this week.