So after watching the stock market take a nose dive again today (especially in my interest group, the financials), the seatbelt is starting to pinch!

 If anyone here remembers, I decided to jump in on a mortgage insurer SCA at $4.00 a share after watching it plummet from $7.50.  The past four days though have driven it down... and down... and down... to where it now lies at $3.47 a share, a good 13-14% drop.

 Now, I'll readily call myself an amateur stock investor, with less than 6 months experience under my belt.  So as the red numbers increase, the warning flags wave and the distress flares in my panicky mind tell me to cut and run, I'm trying to learn the longer term discipline of riding out the down markets and catching ahold of the up ones.

One thing I can cheer myself on is the fact that those covered calls I sold have made those red numbers much more tolerable.  Thank you whoever bought my covered calls, because your premiums have indeed helped my bottom line and kept me from panicking too much! :P

Although worries of recession fly freely, I think the January earnings reports will signal the bottom of this crisis.  For the last time, companies will declare "Oh yeah, we magically lost 3 billion dollars", own up to large negative EPS and then return to the old business.  This by no means will be for every company in the entire financial sector, and there are still more skeletons to fall out of the closet to be sure.  However, there will be an end point to this madness, and I think enough losses will have been declared by the end of January to signify a turning point.  Just a few reports of actual EARNINGS and we'll be back in business.  If there are still more unexpected writedowns?  Then this first quarter will be a royal pain, and it will be well into the second quarter before any major relief is to be found.