Exposure to all these blogs brings me to sites that I would never have found on my own. The Trading for the Masses' daily 'Good to Go' pile is especially fruitful.

Many of these 'experts' are professional Bears. They rarely change their tune, just as there are professional Bulls who rarely change their tune. In both cases, they're likely to be right eventually, especially if they make enough predictions that they can pick and choose the correct ones. (In 1999, I 'predicted' a housing collapse in the next 5 years....etc.)

Ironically, the more predictions they make, the more they can cherry pick. And if they are vague enough, the wrong predictions can be glossed over.

Because no one, not the public, not the blogs, and not the news media ever really checks up on them. Ho, hum. Old news. On to the next exciting disaster.

Politicians live by this.

So I remember articles detailing the imminent collapse of Western Culture because of:

The Savings and Loan Debacle.

The Population Bomb.

Aids.

Environmental disaster.

Global warming.

The Nasdaq collapse.

The Housing Bubble.

Credit Cards.

And so on.

Not that some of these aren't happening, but things like Global Warming are so slow that they can be denied, or glossed over. My kids may not have the luxury.

Anyway, in each of these cases, the effects on my own business were minimal. That is to say, non-existent.

The economy has a way of just rolling along. So the professional Bears can say, "Oh, the problems are just being compounded and the cost will be even higher!" And the professional Bulls can say, "See, nothing dire happened. Go back into your hole."

So, you're frozen in place, because you just don't know what is going to happen. Macro us just too big to predict, too much chaos. Micro, such as the Housing Bubble, that's easy. The world economy? Impossible.

So, while sales are down, my business is actually healthier than it's ever been. It's weird, but at the end of buying everything the store needs, I still have money in my budget. That's NEVER happened, in all these years, even during boom times. (Possibly, because during boom times, I was buying material just to keep up.)

Of course, I positioned myself to actually MAKE profits this year, so maybe it isn't a big triumph to easily pay my bills. Still, I'm feeling kind of smug, with a huge dose of trepidation instilled by the professional Bear Blogs. They make so damned much sense to me.

And yet, and yet.....