First, I want to apologize for the lack of content going up on our site here. Life has been rather busy for the Bullish Dividends Family. I am in the process of selling our house privately, and a family member that was very close has sadly passed away. Today though, I thought I'd go over some of my initial thoughts with selling our house through the ByTheOwner.com service. We have not sold yet, but we have received a lot more 'action' then I originally expected. Our house has been listed a little over 3 weeks now, and we already have two parties which I think will submit offers to us within the next week or so. Some might not think this is very good, but you only have to look at the current market situation, and the fact that we are in the midst of the holiday season which is a time most people put house hunting on hold.

So this past Freaky First Friday, I got the beginnings of my bottom-bounce, despite worse-than-anticipated jobs numbers. (I had anticipated a bounce following better-than-anticipated, although still bad, jobs numbers) An up day ensued, then we saw a gap way up preceding a way-down day, a few down days, another reversal day followed by an up day.... and then Lehman failed to sell itself. D'oh...

Hello at long last. Your local Opportunist has been on holiday and a thought occurred to him while away, and figured it would be good to write a little article about said thought. As a day trader, or any active trader (more than 5 trades in a day I would say), there's a certain amount of patience involved. There's definitely a fine line to walk when it comes to being trigger-happy and trigger-shy. (in a word, disciplined)

For some reason I started thinking about an old Canadian Tire commercial which contained the phrase, "A penny saved is a penny earned" and this led me on to the idea of saving money. I have always been an avid money saver. Sometimes I think my wife loathes me because of my insistence to save money now instead of spend it. And I often catch her rolling her eyes when I talk about the merits of compounding interest. In her defense she is very good at saving money as well, and I find myself very fortunate because of this. But, sometimes I know she would like to spend a little more money then what we do. Because of this, we have developed a good system of discussing any big (> $100) purchase that either of us want to make. Once we have discussed it, we either go out and make the purchase, or we don't.

What else but history do we have for a tool to help predict the future, or at least act in the best possible way in preparation for it? In this context, the performance of a certain strategy towards the markets historically should give a good idea of future performance. You'd have no reason to assume that any strategy would work for the future if you thought it hadn't worked in the past.

“If something seems too good to be true, it probably is.” The old adage is wise council, indeed. (Please picture Homer Simpson brewing Revitalizing Tonic: “After all my get-rich quick schemes, I'm finally going to get rich! And quick!”)

For anyone out there who has read "The Wealthy Barber" then you probably know what I am referring to, and if you haven't read this book, then I recommend you find a copy and read it as soon as you can. Plain and simple, the golden rule is "Save 10% of your income" nothing special there right? well, if you add a couple of extra things to it, it can become one of the most powerful wealth building tools available. You can read all about this in my article Easiest Way to Save Money AND Become Rich over at www.ImprovedLife.ca, but I will give you a quick overview right now.