DJIA

[Grieve]

Don't those numbers disturb you a bit though: 126% "recovery"?

Not really. It all depends on the sector and the individual stocks. For example, some of the banks dropped 90% from the high, as the shorts speculated they would going out of business. Since that didn't happen, a run of 100%, 200%, even 300% isn't unreasonable, and still leaves the stocks massively off their highs.

Then there are stocks like AAPL. It's earning more now than it was a year ago, and with even better to come - why shouldn't it be at a 52-week high? Same for EMC, VISA, McDonalds, Celgene, AmGen, Gilead, First Solar, etc.

And emerging markets are coming of the recession a lot faster than the US, especially with rising commodity costs, so it makes sense for them to outperform.

From a technical perspecitive, the recovery's come so fast there's bound to be some kind of consolidation/breather period for the market/stocks to find a secondary support to feb/mar, wether that be the 07 high or somewhere inbetween...

I don't disagree, but how on earth do you time such a thing? Plenty of people have tried and lost a lot of money doing so over the last few weeks. I screwed up myself shorting AIG.

I've hedged a few of my positions, well worth the $$$ in Puts on my longs...BIDU, AAPL, PCLN, FSLR, CME, ISRG.

I've looked into that, but never actually done it. How far out do your puts go, and how close to in the money? For example, if you were buying a put today on 100 shares of AAPL, what would you buy? An October $185 put for $105+fees?