I agree with you about DX already of course, but I'll also be on the long side of bonds once the deflation sets in. At present, we seem to be going through a "stagflation" stage of rising prices despite falling new capital (that is, falling wealth creation rather than paper fiat creation!)

Crude and Gold have been moneymakers overall in the past for me, whereas Nasdaq, Silver, Feeders, & OJ are all contracts where I traded it once, and lost heavily, so never traded them again. At the other extreme, Cocoa, Hogs, Live Cattle, & Canadian $ I've never had a losing trade in. Trouble is, the setups for this latter group don't occur every day, else I'd have become a pro trader a long time since huh?

I've heard that there is a lot of middle east money representing the "Johnny come lately" aspect of this bull market's "froth", which if true will make it very hard to call the top. I would have thought that for the western investor, the end must already be nigh, and we're just waiting now for the inevitable defaults en masse of credit card debts in this new year (IMHO).

In the UK banks won't lend out decent mortgages to anyone, regardless of credit rating, and will only lend out lousy deals to people putting 25%+ down that have immaculate ratings. Credit cards on the other hand are being given to people with no job, people with bad credit - you name it!

The banks are stark staring mad, and it must surely lead to "Credit Crunch II - The oblivion" showing at some picture house near you soon!

When I say "Lousy mortgage deals" I mean that floating rate mortgages are LIBOR +4.5% (ie 10 times the base rate!) and you cannot fix for more than 5 years, and even then at rates like 4% with large upfront booking/valuation fees to pay. There are deals around that skirt around this, but usually with some other catch like 50% deposits, etc. Re-mortgaging is nowdays done mostly for the purposes of bad debt management - ie credit card firms lean on people to put their card debts onto their mortgages which is a complete con of course. I'm amazed about the ignorance level regarding secured and unsecured debt in this country, but as in all democratic situations, "The majority is automatically right by democracy, even if they are wrong by fact!"