Snap Fraud Exposed

How do we keep scammers from ripping off this program?

 

I guess it would help if more scammers used TikTok. LOL

Woman Who Went Viral for Lying to Get Food Stamps Says She Owes $35,000 - Newsweek

 

Probably one of the best ways to stop these scammers is to just get people to stop watching NewsMax, FOXNews, OANN and all these other far right scammers who lie so blatantly and openly to the American people. Their lies are so bad that they were actually a fundamental and key part of putting a sociopathic liar into the whitehouse, not once, but twice, and now they serve as a mouthpiece for the whole administration of cronies and all of its lies!

 

^^^

Would you expect for MSNBC to cover people ripping off government programs? Conservatives tend to cover those stories.

 

There was a time when we could generally trust the government to be truthful. There are situational exceptions---such as the bombing of Laos, or lies such as, 'read my lips, I will not raise taxes,' which were probably stated with good intentions but turned false when reality required a different course. But overall we could trust what the government said. When the Nixon family asked, I forget who, (Erhlichman?) why Nixon had to be impeached, the answer was simple---because he lied to the American people. Bill Clinton was not impeached because he had sexual relations with someone other than his wife, he was impeached because he lied to the American people.

If you take conservative news outlets---especially far right ones like NewsMax and FOX, and look at the incidence of debunked lies, it is very telling which side actually reports fake news (hint it is not the so-called liberal ones. Liberal outlets may provide news with a liberal bias, but in terms of reporting the truth, they have a pretty good record. JD Vance himself, in reference to the lies about Haitians eating pets, pressed the point that he will lie if that's what it takes to push his agenda!

I'm sure that fraud does occur with SNAP payments. But there are many checks and balances within the system, and there are many years of studies that have found fraud to be fairly low. And yet, Republicans have insisted that there is rampant fraud for decades. To paraphrase what someone recently pointed out----If you have a 100 poor people, and 98 are not able to eat, but 2 of them are scamming the system, liberals will make sure that everyone gets fed, despite the 2 people, while conservatives will make sure almost no one gets fed because of the 2 people.

Obviously news outlets want to report the news---that is how they make money. If there were actual studies that demonstrated SNAP fraud was rampant, of course CNBC, Huffington Post, New York TImes or any other neutral or liberal news outlet would report it.

 

Should any government demonstrate a cavalier attitude toward fiscal house-keeping it will create a distrust amongst its citizens to advancing additional tax monies.
Those billionaires who are on everyone's lips got to their position by watching expenditures.
What must they think about the furies produced in Elon's DOGE attempts?
Capitalists deal with fiscal audits all the time.

We need additional tax money to flow to American government. A hostile attitude toward the public fisc will not help.

One might take the approach that Fiscal leakage is merely redistribution by another name. Helpful, if it's beneficiaries are ones own fellows.

Financial housekeeping will be the first step in gaining additional taxes from America's wealthiest people. Of course government can just extort the funds by whatever means, that would be a dose of fascism.

I'm optimistic that most are patriotic and will contribute taxes in a well thought out program. Perhaps I'm naive. We are in a position of depending on a small subset of citizens to boost our public fisc, a "you didn't build that" attitude is unhelpful.

Perhaps MSNOW should carry those stories, the wealthy read them, we all should.

 

I would believe that at least 85-90% of SNAP goes to people that really need it. Yes, there will be fraud anywhere, but the bottom line is, nobody enjoys being poor with hungry kids. Fraud could be reduced if there were a few more case managers, but when you have one person who is managing thousands of people...how much can they do? SNAP probably pays more in card processing fees than they do in fraud.

 

Not that Monica set him up any.....keeping the jizzed dress. They spent more money investigating and prosecuting Bill's blowjob than the entire 9-11 event.

 

I used to have the naive impression that most people in our government would do, at the very least, what they thought was right for the country, especially in the face of a dire situation.

When I lived in the Philippines and saw what kind of a horrible self-serving circus the Philippines had for a government, I would somewhat condescendingly tell my wife, "In America..." I literally bought a book of blank pages in which I could write humorous satire about Philippine politics----it read much like today's Daily Show episodes. Every morning I would sit with my coffee, reading the morning paper, and then write another entry. But after a short time, I began to realize that all I really needed to do was to clip out the news articles-----the blatant hypocrisy, lies, and corruption were so funny on their own, I didn't even need to write anything!

Then I came back to America... By the mid-2000's I saw America drop to the Philippine level----and now we are even worse! Seriously---what is happening today---you can't write this stuff! It would be a hilarious comedy if it was fiction. Unfortunately, and tragically, it is not!

Anyway----I'm getting off track. In 2007 and 2008, while I still worked in the stock market, I watched the Bush Administration make horrible economic mistakes, one after another, as America was spiraling into a credit crisis. Some of the decisions they made were based off of incompetence, and economic ignorance, others were based on self-interest and greed. Some of these mistakes, like allowing Lehman Brothers to go under, were incredibly dangerous, not just for the US economy, but the entire global economy. Very few people realize how close we were to a complete economic meltdown, and how serious that would have been.

Then Obama won the election in 2008. His administration made some mistakes as well (if I had his ear, for example, I would have had him gradually shifting longer term treasury debt into shorter term instruments, gradually lowering long term obligations for the country), but very few people realize how he, and the FED, steered us out of a depression. It is nothing short of amazing. In fact, when you consider that every step of the way, the Republicans fought him tooth and nail on everything he did, it was nothing short of miraculous!

Over and over I thought, 'well surely the Republicans will come together on this----it is to save our Nation, how could they not agree to this?!' And yet every time I was mortified to see them fight back and try to stop it, the consequences of their success being that our economy could collapse. Every single one of them cared more about their own quest for power. They were literally trying to make Obama fail, which would have been disastrous. Simply so that Republicans would come out better in the next election. Every one of them were traitors.

We came out of the Great Recession with a spectacular record breaking recovery. Many people may not have felt it, but they also do not realize how bad things really were. After all, we live in a nation of idiots when it comes to economics. I guarantee that if the Republicans had succeeded in stopping Obama, we would still be suffering from a horrible depression to this day.

And as far as the GOP----they never regained their moral compass. Every single move they have made since 2008 serves only to further their own self-interests, their greed, and their power. Nothing more. And because Americans have so little economic literacy---they can't see it. After the reckless things they did under Obama, that should have been the end of the party. But Americans continue to be fooled by lies and gladly and proudly vote against their own self-interests.

Part of what made America so great was that there was this constant tug and pull between conservatives and liberals. This counteracted the excesses of both sides, and it served as a dynamic to give life, energy, and strength to the liberal ideals of the Enlightenment. Granted, we did many things that made us not so great---but we wee learning and improving for much of our history. The thing is, we need liberals and conservative both! But the GOP is no longer that conservative party. It is a dangerous far right element.

In some ways, the American Empire peaked in the 1980's. In my own economic writings, I understood this to be around the point when we shifted from the era of oil to the era of Silicon (Oil was the primary coefficient of production and efficiency in the former era, silicon is that coefficient in the latter), or you could say that it was the dawn of the Information Age. We have the capacity of tremendous growth and industrial efficiency--and we have already seen that----unprecedented economic growth where high employment and low inflation can continue for extended periods together---something that was believed impossible in traditional economics. The underlying strength of our economy today is based on this technological advancement. It is the very reason that Obama had such a long period of economic strength, and why Trump's pandemic did not completely crash the economy, and that Biden could produce unprecedented job growth under his administration, and the best post-pandemic recovery in the world. Also, very important, globalization and trade cooperation around the world that created global supply chains that strung deeply into international markets and regions, and that was post-colonially beginning to share the wealth with every nation, was key to this growth; this new age.

But in the 1980's, the cancer of greed began to spread throughout our nation. And Trump is the iconic greedy 1980's businessman---how can anyone not see that? Reagan's Supply Side economics, or Trickle Down Economics as it is best known, has made the wealthy very wealthy, and is slowly and demonstrably impoverishing the rest of the nation. Our middle class is disappearing, and those who are rising upwards from it are doing so, not because of trickle-down economics, but because of the strength of the economy from the new Silicon era, and the power of the new global trade structure. Trickle-down economics is a massive failure for everyone except the very wealthy.

Obama started to transition us from trickle-down economics, such as through Obama-care (which was originally a Republican idea--back when there were Republicans that worked for the American people), which was intended to take financial control away from the collusion between insurance companies, HMO's, etc. (Unfortunately what we have today for healthcare is the result of the GOP fighting to destroy everything Obama did.) But Biden was the first one to try to really shift away from, trickle-down economics, and Harris would have continued that.

But, all the stupid Americans believed that Trump would lower prices, and give them tax breaks, and make them rich. Trump is doing exactly what he really said he would do, and what he really meant when he said all the other things: he is continuing massive tax breaks for the very wealthy, removing all the people who do the hard jobs that Americans refuse to do, destroying our participation in global trade, destroying academia and research creating a debilitating brain drain (which, by the way, is one of the reasons that our trade deficit with other countries was meaningless, because we were a magnet for global intelligence----at the top of bringing in researchers, specialists, professors and teachers, academics, and highly skilled workers from around the world), and cementing us into focusing on dying industries like oil (so much for protecting the environment). What's worse, he is also being a dictator from day one.

The rest of the world is now forging relationships to continue to enjoy this new era---without America. We could have continued to be the main player at the top, but idiocy is rapidly killing the empire.





(P.S. If you are interested in my idea of the Silicon Era and the primary coefficient of progress and efficiency, it is something that is demonstrated by long term cycles in wholesale inflation---roughly about 60 year cycles. In our history as a nation, we have gone through, wood, steam, oil, and now silicon. It is very much like the Kondratieff Wave or Kondratieff Cycle, which he found for Europe, though I don't think he had an explanation for why his wave occurs. Clearly it is based on that primary element that is at the core of drving economic growth for that period.)

 

Oh my. US silicon is dead in the water without having our own fabs, packaging and test. Not to mention having world class contract manufacturers that could put a phone together in a scale that could put a dent in our dependence on Asia. Those are all ten year seriously cash intensive projects.

Trickle down economics...the only thing that trickled down on us was warm, wet and yellow..

 

Yes, I agree.

As far as the US silicon industry, I understand the fear and concerns. It is a strategic problem. But that does not reflect the newer paradigm of a new world order that began with Pax Americana, and evolved into globalization. This globalization has caused each country to be more deeply integrated with its trade partners.

Take car parts, for example, Trump tried to tariff car parts based on what percentage a car part was foreign manufactured. But there are all kinds of individual car parts that will literally travel back and forth across the border multiple times as they are being manufactured. How can we determine what is American made, vs foreign made when the manufacturing is all over the place?

Back in the 80's I worked in the stock market in Tokyo as an analyst. I was also a member of the American Chamber of Commerce in Japan, The Osaka International Forum, and then later, the American Chamber of Commerce in the Philippines. I played my part, although a small part it was, through the American Chambers of Commerce, and the Osaka International Forum, in helping create this globalized trade. There was a general belief in the 1980's, especially in America that the Japanese markets were closed to foreign businesses. The problem was not that the markets were closed, rather that American companies were very arrogant in pushing their products off to Japan. They would try to sell products that were suitable to American tastes and demands, but not to Japanese ones. One of the first companies we helped was a company that made firefighting gear. The problem was, it was all designed to fit Americans who tended to be bigger than Japanese. Helmets, for example were too big. So they came to the ACCJ to see if we could help them open up the markets. We quickly identified their problem and they immediately were able to start selling in Japan. In this way we started helping numerous American companies sell in Japan.

In fact, I am pretty sure I have told the story here on Hip Forums of how in early 1988 the Tokyo research department of Shearson Lehman flew to New York to give fund managers a presentation on the Tokyo market---I was the star analyst because I had a knack (and luck) for picking stocks, and every stock I covered climbed a decent percentage--noticeably moreso than other analysts (partly because I used charts to pick which stocks I would cover, which is unusual because analysts are supposed to use fundamentals (financial and business data) as opposed to technicals (charts). I reported and discussed the fundamentals in my reports, but I chose the companies by the charts. The rest was luck, and a strong Tokyo market.). Anyway the presentation was in a large conference room in a Trump property, and at some point Trump joined in. Afterwards he came over and shook my hand, and started talking to me. He wanted to talk about how bad the Japanese are with their closed markets. He immediately started talking tariffs, wanting me to agree with him. I then tried to tell him that it was International Economics 101 that tariffs were bad for the country and everyone loses (And yes, in college as a double major in International Business and Finance, we spent probably a whole quarter in International Economics 101 going over tariffs, case studies, etc and how bad they were.) He wouldn't let me finish and said something else about tariffs. I then tried to explain to him what we in the American Chamber of Commerce in Japan were trying to do, and how we were opening up markets for American companies. But he wouldn't hear it, and just waved me off with, "What do you know? You are just a stupid college kid."

Anyway, I was well versed in the follies of American business as we came out of the post world war II boom years, follies that after a great post war success through the 50's and 60's resulted in a decline in American business and market share in the 70's and 80's-----it was pure arrogance. American companies believed we were at the top, and nothing would tear us down. So they had no interest in innovation, plant investment, or efficiency, and were completely blind sided by the rise of the more innovative and revolutionary business models of Japan and other rising countries. (Surprisingly, it was an American who tried to get American automakers to adopt more efficient models, and was scorned by American firms, so he took his ideas to Japan.) On top of that, I was influenced by Alvin Toffler's theory on The Third Wave, so I certainly could see a new day coming when markets were more integrated globally and that if America were to share the wealth rather than exploit nations as a colonial overlord, that we would all benefit. Naturally that fit in well with my hippie ideology as well.

So is the problem that America is dependent on Taiwan's chip industry? Or is it part of this new paradigm that Taiwan's chip industry is integrated into America's technological industries? Are we seeing the emergence of a new world where peace is the norm, and countries around the world work together, as opposed to defending themselves against each other as has been the past?

We are certainly seeing a resolution to the old economic problem of national competitive advantages----as different countries find themselves in different periods of industrial development and facing regional factors they naturally have competitive advantages over other nations in specific types of industry, or manufacturing processes, or in other ways. And unlike the old traditions, in which 1st world nations would perpetuate colonial exploitation by having large businesses take advantage of local labor and resources and exploit the local economies ultimately taking profits from those same local economies, we have been watching a general rise in local economies around the world as domestic enterprises grow and foreign enterprises take deeper root into these local economies to create development and grow wealth locally.

As the world shrinks, and markets become more deeply interconnected, one would hope for a greater cooperation between nations, and that world peace would become the norm, as nations share in global objectives and wealth creation. Granted, it is an evolving process and unfortunately Neo-Liberal ideas do pop in from time to time in efforts to exploit and to protect the traditional power interests.

But it makes a lot of sense that we would evolve into this direction. Because the overall cosmological philosophy of the Modern Western world is that of Einstein's Relativity. So we are living in a world of relativism. Pax Americana---the American peace brought about post world war II by strategic cooperation of many countries under the guidance of the US can be seen as an early relativist system. Ideally, the US was not meant to be a colonial leader, but rather a friendly superpower that was to maintain order by policing the world. This relativism replaced the older mechanistic cosmology of Newton. But today we are at a time when this is being replaced by the cosmology of quantum mechanics which reflects the multiplistic reality of a myriad of quanta. So in time we could see Pax Americana being replaced by a multiplicity of nations working together for the greater good of humanity, rather than for the domination of one nation, group, race, or people.

Trump cannot understand this kind of world. Instead he is trapped in the older mechanistic Newtonian cosmology, defined by an us vs them duality. America becomes nothing more than a machine, controlled entirely by him, to fight and try to dominate all the other machines of Nations around us. Not only is this a reversion to a bygone era, but it is a reactionary revolt against the liberalism of the Enlightenment.

The rest of the world will pass us up...

 

wow...

My biggest concern is China with silicon. They lock down Taiwan or someone lobs a bomb into TSMC and the world is fucked.

I've been a little top heavy with AI stocks, the return has just been too good. I think it's time to get off that bandwagon.

 

Yes I agree----we aren't quite in that world of peace yet. China is certainly a big risk to the chip industry. If they were to do something like that, the world would be fucked. And how are they going to play in this new globalized world. Trump in his first term, while idiotically trying to destroy lots of trade relations, walked out of rooms with lots of doors open, which China happily walked into. And he is doing that now too. MAGA fail to understand that it is really Make Russia Great Again and Make China Great Again. And China is not exactly the poster child of freedom and democracy. What political environment would they push, and influence? And as a superpower in a world with an isolationist and self-defeated America, what new forms of Colonialism might the engage in?


AI is overbought, but the returns will probably be good until the music stops. And then, as the old saying on Wall Street goes, When the Cat House gets raided, even the piano player is taken------meaning that when the market crashes, every stock will sooner or later get hit (of course this old saying comes from a time well before short ETF's which will rise as the market falls). There is a crash coming and it will be bad.

I once did a study on the only cycle in the market that is remarkably consistent, yet very few people know about it, and no one talks about it----the 4-year cycle in market bottoms. It was a technical study (i.e. a chart study) so anyone can do it themselves and see what I was talking about. This cycle is as follows, every 4th year, give or take 6 months, the market will hit a significant bottom. By significant bottom, this means a bear market bottom, as opposed to a correction, so it has to be deep enough to stand out, be confirmed by other indices, break through trend lines and 200 day moving averages, etc.

Years ago, while working in the stock market, I used the Bloomberg terminal to look at the Dow as far back as I could, which happened to be the year 1900. I then printed out 4 or 5 year segments of the Dow from then to the present. I verified that there is indeed this 4 year cycle. At the time there were 2 exceptions. Now there is what I would call, 3 exceptions and 1 anomaly.

The 3 exceptions are as follows-----1.) there should have been a bottom in 1928, but it happened after the 1929 crash---I think it was 1930 or so, I forget. 2.) there should have been a bottom in 1986, but it happened after the '87 crash, I forget if the bottom was '87 or '88, but if it was '87, it was well after the 6 month give or take window (the crash was in October as I recall---I met my Filipina wife on a Tokyo subway the following weekend...). 3.) There should have been a bottom in 2006, but it happened in 2009.

The one anomaly is that we had an early bottom in 2020 during the pandemic, which was followed by the cycllical bottom on schedule in 2022.

What is amazing is that after these exceptions the market returns to the original 4-year cycle. There should have been a bottom, as I said in 1928, but there was one in 1932 right on schedule. There should have been a bottom in 1986, there was one in 1990. There should have been a bottom in 2006, there was one in 2010 (It was a one-day crash, and they blamed it on computer trading, etc. but it was deep enough that it met the criteria as a significant bottom, and confirmed by the fact that the next bottom was on schedule in 2014). And as far as the anomaly---we had a bottom in 2018, and the next one, after the anomaly was 2022.

What these exceptions tell us is that there are rare speculative periods, extended by fear (meaning that the last investors are late to the party and keep it going), that will keep the market climbing past its prime, so to speak.

What the anomaly tells us, is that if you put a self-serving idiot in the White House, it can make the world unpredictable. Seriously----in what is now 125 years this never happened before Trump. We have had pandemics and Pearl Harbor and all kinds of other calamities, and it has never happened befofe, and I'm pretty sure the same is true before 1900. There was no index to go on prior to the late 1890's, but there are records of the crashes and bear markets, and as near as I could tell, this cycle was consistent even then. (Granted, I have never done an in-depth study of that, but a cursory understanding of what information I do have in old books describing the old crashes and depressions suggests that it was true then too.) I have not taken the time to really look at it, but the market weakness last spring may also be the same kind of anomaly. It could have been a correction similar to what we had in 2007, before the crash at the start of 2008. But it was fairly deep, and if it was in fact a significant bottom, it would be another anomaly. 2026 is the next year for a significant bottom, and that bottom last spring was outside of the 6 month give or take. The take-away is that Trump is such a bad leader that even the markets become unpredictable.

But this cycle tells us that we should have a bottom in 2026, give or take 6 months. As a significant bottom, it will be the biggest drop since 2022, and it could even drop below 2022. Even below the 2018 bottom, the 2014 bottom, etc. I.e., it is only during these significant bottoms that we can break through a previous bottom or bottoms.

I was even fooled by the weakness last spring. I thought that it could be the start of the bear market. Any time I talked about it, I did point out that it could just be a correction, similar to the summer of 2007, and would talk about how unpredictable Trump makes the market. But I did understand the damage Trump was doing to the economy, and there was an inversion of the yield curve which more often than not, precedes a bear market. But there was one big problem, which is why I was always unsure of whether it was the start of a bear market------another old saying on Wall Street that is very true: 'A bull market climbs a wall of worry.' In other words, as long as there is fear in the market, it will keep climbing. This relates to the idea that as long as there are investors that haven't come to the table yet, the market will rise. When that last investor jumps in, that's when it is over. The market under Trump has been a bit hard to trade, and this is because there is so much uncertainty.

So how will you know when to get out? People have always told me, "No one can predict the top!" or "No one can predict the bottom!" But I called or predicted every signficant top and significant bottom since one fateful night in 2006---all the way to the end of my career in 2012, and then some. What happened that night----I found Jesus, or, I was struck by lightning, or, I had a near death experience----pick one (LMAO!!!) --------No. Actually I went out drinking with a good friend of mine. I was working at Yamatane Securities---the first foreigner in Japan to ever work for a Japanese brokerage firm and get licensed to be a broker. (There was one foreigner ahead of me who passed the Japanese brokers exam, but he worked for Merrill Lynch. I was the second one to pass). One of the Directors of Yamatane introduced me to a trader, Mr. Sagara. He knew that we were both very valuable assets to the firm and that we were very likely to jump ship to a more lucrative position in a foreign investment bank. So he introduced us in hopes that as friends we would keep each other at Yamatane. (Instead, we helped each other get into foreign houses----he became a trader at Union Bank of Switzerland, and I an analyst at Shearson Lehman). His English was very good, and he was the only one at Yamatane that I would speak English with. Anyway, one of the first nights we went out drinking, he said to me, "I notice that when everyone is vary excited about the market and wanting to buy, that is when it turns and falls. And when everyone is scared and panicking, that is when it turns at the bottom." I agreed but said, "That is textbook finance." and he responded, "I know but no one pays attention to it, and I think it can be used to tell when the market will turn." He talked to a lot of traders and I talked to a lot of people as well, so when the market would start to get very positive or very negative, we would take notes of what people were saying and then compare them with each other. It was pretty amazing. We could spot a market top within a week or two, and a bottom within a day or two! We did this through out the time I lived in Japan.

After I returned to the States, I worked at Schwab, and I thought, would this strategy still work? Because now I don't talk to institutional investors and professional traders, and even the employees of Schwab were basically order takers and not of the caliber of market skill that I was surrounded with at Shearson, for example. The clientele I worked with were active traders and not many of them were all that sophisticated. But sure enough, the same psychology was at play. Then there was the time in between Shearson and Schwab. I tried to set up an investment firm in the Philippines, and my only source of market psychology then was a few hours of CNBC I would get on cable at night----the market opening in New York. (That venture failed, by the way, as my first wife, a Japanese girl, stole much of my wealth out of a bank in Japan, before I could move it, and then a coup attempt in the Philippines that coincidentally happened the day after we opened business as my investors were visiting Manila for the launch of the company. I did not want to work for them, which would have been the case without my money, so the coup was the excuse to shut it down. I gave them a parting gift---Philippine treasury rates jumped to about 35% after the coup, and the peso was pegged to the dollar so it was fairly low risk. They all made 35% over the next year.)

ANYWAY----long story short-----how can someone who does not work in the industry identify tops and bottoms the same way? By watching or listening to CNBC----my favorite time would be an hour before and after market open. In fact, working at Schwab, I had about a 45 min to an hour commute in the mornings, and I had XM satellite through which I would listen to CNBC before and into the opening on my drive in.

People would always say to me things like, "CNBC is just scamming you, trying to get you to buy." I would respond---no that is wrong, first of all, because even the best people in the market have no idea what tomorrow will bring. There is no inside information or crystal ball. What they are telling you is exactly what they are feeling. It doesn't matter if they are right or wrong. What you need to know is what they are feeling and thinking. You are listening to the psychology of the market. If you pay attention enough, you will see a time when they become overly happy, the market seems like it will got up for ages, it's the best time ever. There is a noticeably strong surge in their sentiment. (Technical indicators try to show this, but none of them will work as good as actually hearing the people themselves.) The market top will be within a matter of a week or two from when this bullish sentiment really begins. You probably won't pick up on it if you just listen from time to time, but if you are trying to read their psychology on a daily basis I am sure anyone could pick up on this. Likewise at the bottom there is a day or two, when everything seems especially bleak. Its as if they have given up completely and think the market will only go down forever. The bottom will hit that day, or the next.

Most important is that you understand the euphoria and the panic and you don't get caught up in it-----and that can be very difficult. But as long as you understand what is happening, that is half the battle.

Now what if you don't want to listen to CNBC everyday? Today I don't do that. But my investment strategy today does not require that I know what will happen tomorrow. I jump in and out for a quick return, with a minimum goal of 3% per week.

But the charts are a pretty good way to tell you when to get out. You can set stop orders based on broken trend lines, and moving averages. You might want to leave enough room to hopefully eliminate most false signals. There were all kinds of trend lines that came together in 2007 on all the indices----I never saw anything like it. You could draw the same lines on the Dow, the S&P, the Nasdaq, and the Russell 2000. And you could choose different time frames and they still came together the same. Most importantly there was a long term trend line going back to the bottom in 2002 that came to the same point. In November or December '07 I started telling everyone that if the indices break through this line, get out! The market peaked in mid to late December, and meandered down till it broke the trend lines the second or third day of January 2008. I was out at that point. It crashed a day or two shortly after. There are other indicators as well---the inverted yield curve I mentioned, that may or may not happen before a crash. The problem is the curve can be inverted for months and months before the crash.