Ms. Park was a guest on CTV's Canada AM, Tues October 7 at 7:05 am est talking about the current market melt down and what real life investors can do to protect their money. You can view the clip here.   more »

Since this global bear market began last October, market participants remained largely in the state of disbelief. For those of us trying to point out the looming risks it was rather difficult to watch the damage mount as "fools fiddled". Week after week and month after month mainstream financial "advisors' called the bottom and pled for people to stay put, look long-term, don't blink.

That always works for a while to keep people in. Then in about August of 2008, belief in the economic downturn began. Each day, more people were turning bearish on the economy. More people began to voice concerns that the credit crunch was not abating and risked lasting harm to the economy. The Volatility Index (VIX) that had been slumbering along at record complacency below 10 for much of 2006 started to pick up.

As world governments have pulled out one band aid solution after another over the past few months, realization began to dawn, that government intervention was coming much too little, too late, to avert the damage. The time for proactive regulation and leadership needed to avoid the present mess was two and three years ago. Governments are now left trying to treat the cancer rather than avert its onset.

And as investors bled through one of the worst quarters in history to the end of last week, fear and tension mount. The VIX spiked above 40 a few times in the last couple of weeks. Today it is above 55. Panic has set in. I think it is likely to take more than a couple of days of panic to find this bottom. I suspect selling pressure could escalate over the next several days as investors begin to receive their quarter end statements and pension boards begin to realize what a grave error they made in adding commodities as a passive asset class this past year.

At our firm, for this down cycle, the technical downside tests were defined as 10,000 on the TSX and the Dow, 1,000 on the S&P 500 and 2000 on the NASDAQ. We are now through all of these levels as I write, but for the S&P which has a further 36 points of decline to confirm. We believed these levels were likely in this correction, we simply could not predict whether they would happen in a matter of days or months.

And so the question of the week: will the indices hold and bounce from here?...   more »