Hit by a BUD Beer Truck

We ran into a BUD(BUD) beer truck going $60 earlier in the week. Others of you might have overdosed on Bristol-Myers (BMY) 5 points ago or drank a little Clorox (CLX) cocktail at $45. In each of these cases, supposedly safe stocks slaughtered anybody who sampled the merchandise.

This was a week where people got killed in safety, where they thought how much lower could Coke (KO) or McDonald's(MCD) or Pfizer (PFE) go and they discovered that the answer was: much.

Of course, you could say that all this was more than compensated for by the billions in market cap tacked on by an InfoSpace(INSP) or a Commerce One(CMRC). But stocks aren't meant to be zero sum games. It seems that the whole world, indexing, growth and value, has decided en masse to use any good news from "plain old stocks" -- POS?! -- like a buy back or a great quarter, to exit.

The effect is extremely debilitating. When we got hit by Anheuser Busch going $60, then braking to $57, we hardly knew what had hit us. It happened in an instant. We barely got the license plate number.

It's one thing to own a stock and have it do nothing or underperform on a weekly basis. But to be in a Blue Chip and discover that it trades like a White Chip -- forget Red -- is shocking. We now bear bruises from buying POS even as we parade around proudly with our Nokias (NOK) and Oracles(ORCL).

It's enough to make you stay away from anything that you've ever owned before and embrace only the most speculative of securities because the speculative stuff doesn't fall as fast as BUD!

What a weird era. What a relief it's Friday. How about a betting pool for where the Dow goes out today? In the office pool I have 9900.

Random musings: Don't forget to call in and ask me about stocks on our show. I don't use any of that "long-term hold" stuff, either. Much stronger brew served here.

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