Interesting Interview

Did anyone see Ron Insana's interview with Bill Strazzulo of State Street Global?

Bill believes that the market will not provide much upside. He said investors should own dividend paying stocks, not be buy and hold, and try to trade around the market's gyrations.

Ron didn't call him on that so I will, sort of. His assessment of the market may be 100% correct. He may also be right about trading in and out being the best way to make money.

But trying to trade like this is a bad idea for almost everyone. I have written before that plenty of people have success short term trading, but it is very difficult and not the best thing for most people.

It surprises me that CNBC would air that type of advice.

Sentiment in the market seems to be washing out. CNBC has had all sorts of programming devoted to what's wrong. Phil Orlando, the guest host on Squawk Box this morning, said he is disappointed and confused. What?

I have no doubt Phil is very smart and good at what he does but I was surprised to hear someone like him speak with such emotion. I'm not quite sure how Phil was so caught off guard. I've written many time that earnings estimates for 2005 are a lot lower. He knows that. The year end mark up and subsequent unwinding of that mark up seemed quite obvious which is what I wrote here and said in the few interviews I do. The last time I was on CNBC Asia, I think Mandy was caught off guard by my negative outlook because she came at me a couple of different ways on the subject.

I will say that now we are in the midst of this move I'm not sure exactly where it stops. I still don't think, though, that we will breach the 200 DMA.

I hope you do not succumb to emotion in your portfolios. There aren't a lot of stocks I follow or own that are having problems unique to their businesses. I wrote a while ago that guidance would not be great, and that has come to pass so far. Very little has worked in the market this month but we are not down a lot, at least not yet.

We can't know what will happen, but we can have opinions. Being really worried about a bad month is very short term oriented. Most people have longer time frames than one month, or one year for that matter. I am quite certain that in stock market history there have been other 3-4 week down periods before. That it is occurring in January which is rare, I think, means nothing. Stick to whatever your strategy is and realize sometimes they go down.