By Elliott Wave International

It’s hard to believe that 2011 has passed so quickly and that 2012 will soon be here. Now is a good time to look back over the past year and assess your finances. Did your choices this year put you in better or worse circumstances? Do you have the information needed to make wise decisions in the next year? Are you prepared to protect your financial future?

The following excerpt from Conquer the Crash explains the importance of preparing and taking action now so that you’ll be ready for what’s ahead. You can read 8 more chapters from Conquer the Crash — 42 pages of critical information, including a list of imperative “dos and don’ts” — Free. Find out how below.

Chapter 14: Making Preparations and Taking Action

The ultimate effect of deflation is to reduce the supply of money and credit. Your goal is to make sure that it doesn’t reduce the supply of your money and credit. The ultimate effect of depression is financial ruin. Your goal is to make sure that it doesn’t ruin you.

Many investment advisors speak as if making money by investing is easy. It’s not. What’s easy is losing money, which is exactly what most investors do. They might make money for a while, but they lose eventually. Just keeping what you have over a lifetime of investing can be an achievement. That’s what this book is designed to help you do, in perhaps the single most difficult financial environment that exists.

Protecting your liquid wealth against a deflationary crash and depression is pretty easy once you know what to do. Protecting your other assets and ensuring your livelihood can be serious challenges. Knowing how to proceed used to be the most difficult part of your task because almost no one writes about the issue.

Preparing to Take the Right Actions
In a crash and depression, we will see stocks going down 90 percent and more, mutual funds collapsing, massive layoffs, high unemployment, corporate and municipal bankruptcies, bank and insurance company failures and ultimately financial and political crises. The average person, who has no inkling of the risks in the financial system, will be shocked that such things could happen, despite the fact that they have happened repeatedly throughout history.

Being unprepared will leave you vulnerable to a major disruption in your life. Being prepared will allow you to make exceptional profits both in the crash and in the ensuing recovery. For now, you should focus on making sure that you do not become a zombie-eyed victim of the depression.

The best news of all is that this depression should be relatively brief, though it will seem like an eternity while it is in force. The longest depression on record in the U.S. lasted three years and five months, from September 1929 to February 1933. The longest sustained stock market decline in U.S. history lasted seven years, from 1835 to 1842, and featured two depressions in close proximity. As the expected trend change is of one larger degree than those, it should be a commensurately large setback, but it should still be brief relative to the duration of the preceding advance.

Taking the Right Actions
Countless advisors have touted “stocks only,” “gold only,” “diversification,” a “balanced portfolio” and other end-all solutions to the problem of attending to your investments. These approaches are usually delusions. As I try to make clear in the following pages, no investment strategy will provide stability forever. You will have to be nimble enough to see major trends coming and make changes accordingly. What follows is a good guide, I think, but it is only a guide.

The main goal of investing in a crash environment is safety. When deflation looms, almost every investment category becomes associated with immense risks. Most investors have no idea of these risks and will think you are a fool for taking precautions.

Many readers will object to taking certain prudent actions because of the presumed cost. For example: “I can’t take a profit; I’ll have to pay taxes!” My reply is, if you don’t want to pay taxes, well, you’ll get your wish; your profit will turn into a loss, and you won’t have to pay any taxes. Or they say, “I can’t sell my stocks for cash; interest rates are only 2 percent!” My reply is, if you can’t abide a 2 percent annual gain, well, you’ll get your wish there, too; you’ll have a 30 percent annual loss instead. Others say, “I can’t cash out my retirement plan; there’s a penalty!” I reply, take your money out before there is none to get. Then there is the venerable, “I can’t sell now; I’d be taking a loss!” I say no, you are recovering some capital that you can put to better use. My advice always is, make the right move, and the costs will take care of themselves.

If you are preoccupied with pedestrian concerns or blithely going along with mainstream opinions, you need to wake up now, while there is still time, and actively take charge of your personal finances. First you must make your capital, your person and your family safe. Then you can explore options for making money during the crash and especially after it’s over.

As the subtitle implies, this book is designed as a guide for arranging your finances prior to any future deflationary depression, whether one occurs now, as I expect, or not. Although I want this book to have value beyond the present situation, some of the specifics of my suggestions are time-sensitive by nature. If you need to know today where you can find the few exceptionally sound banks, insurers and other essential service providers, if you want to locate the safest structures in the world for storing your wealth, whether in paper monetary instruments or physical assets such as precious metals, you will find the answers in these chapters. Yet over time, the best institutions and services today might be long gone, and others may have taken their place. For a few years at least, we will post free updates to this information at www.conquerthecrash.com/readerspage. But if you read this book 50 years from now, you may have to do your own research to fit the investment options and service providers available at the time. Nevertheless, the general nature of your goals should be much as outlined herein.

Most people do not have the foggiest idea how to prepare their investments for a deflationary crash and depression, so the techniques are almost like secrets today. The following chapters show you a few steps that will make your finances secure despite almost anything that such an environment can throw at them.

8 Chapters of Conquer the Crash — FREE! This free, 42-page report can help you prepare for your financial future. You’ll get valuable lessons on what to do with your pension plan, what to do if you run a business, how to handle calling in loans and paying off debt and so much more. Get Your FREE 8-Lesson “Conquer the Crash Collection” Now >>

Be Sociable, Share!

• 

By Elliott Wave International

As the news from Europe about bailouts and the euro’s viability changes by the hour, EWI’s European editor, Brian Whitmer, doesn’t see the uncertainty as a problem. In fact, he points out that when uncertainty blooms, you can really see that markets aren’t rational and that Elliott waves tend to become even clearer. He discusses the “uncertainty in Europe” in this excerpt from the November European Financial Forecast:

Markets Aren’t Rational
How many times did analysts blame the summer sell-off on “uncertainty in Europe”? But as stocks rallied over the past two months, notice that the European situation became more uncertain, not less, as the headlines in this chart attest. Who would have guessed that stocks could jump 30% amidst such uncertainty?

Likewise, the financial press uniformly attributed last Thursday’s [Oct. 27, 2011] 5% upward spike to reports that EU leaders had reached “broad agreement” on a path forward. But, here, too, uncertainty, not accord, prevailed that day. “Most details remain,” said an economic consultant quoted in the Financial Times. “We have a few more weeks of uncertainty to digest,” added a bank executive with Royal Bank of Canada. Much of what is needed “has not yet been finalized,” concluded the FT. The most important item of news that day was that Greece’s bondholders would take a 50% haircut. But even here, the plan was either short on details, under discussion, or otherwise unclear, according to news reports. As stocks fall again, the press will cite all these reasons and more to rationalize the decline.

Free Report The European Debt Crisis and Your Investments The European Debt Crisis is affecting investments across the globe. Elliott Wave International’s analysts have been anticipating and tracking the credit crisis across the European nations, alerting subscribers to the impact it could have on their investments. This free report offers commentary from February 2010 through November 2011 that will help you to better understand what could be in store in the coming months and years. Download your free report now.

Be Sociable, Share!

• 

By Elliott Wave International

Many people still talk about a “recovery,” or at worst only see a possible double-dip recession. But what if the mistake was to think the economy was only in a recession in the first place? It can’t “double-dip” when it never truly recovered:

“The respite following the 2009 stock market low is not a new expansion. It has failed to improve housing sales, barely caused employment to budge, and hasn’t managed — despite the unprecedented manufacture of new Fed money — to get the total supply of credit back above its 2008 high.”

Elliott Wave Theorist, Sept. 2011

Indeed, the Federal Reserve’s quantitative easing measures have failed.

The Fed’s latest policy plan to stimulate the economy has been dubbed “Operation Twist.”

“On September 30, the Fed started operation twist, by which it will sell its holdings of short-term Treasuries and use the proceeds to buy longer-dated T-bonds. The goal is to foster more credit by lowering long-term borrowing costs. But last month [we] noted that low rates compound the money-making problem for banks by reducing margins. ‘Historical verification of this development is obvious from Japan,’ says a recent report from Hoisington Investment Management. ‘Normal bank lending functions are essentially shut down. This risk now confronts the U.S.’ The problem is not the cost of credit; it’s demand, which is waning. Lower rates will have little effect in helping foster enough expansion to allow the mountain of total credit-market debt built up over the last 70 years to be repaid, or even serviced.”

Elliott Wave Financial Forecast, November 2011

Imagine if the newspapers reported that Bernanke appeared before Congress and said this:

“‘This is the most serious financial crisis we’ve seen, at least since the 1930s, if not ever.’”

Bernanke did not say that, but his counterpart in Britain did. As reported by The Telegraph (Oct. 6), the comment came from Sir Mervyn King, the Governor of the Bank of England.

The Fed is unable to stimulate the economy, the unemployment rate is not improving, and housing is in a “triple-dip” in some areas of the country. What does this mean for the markets and your investments in 2012? Elliott Wave International just released a free report to help you navigate the markets and prepare for what’s ahead. You’ll get hard facts, 25 eye-opening charts and 14 pages of straightforward commentary that will put the volatile market action of the past months into perspective within the “big picture” to help you position for the years to come. Download your free report now.

Be Sociable, Share!

• 

By Elliott Wave International

Elliott wave analysis can warn you of trend changes when the rest of the investment public least expects a market reversal. With that in mind, we have created a new report for our free Club EWI members: “The Next Major Disaster Developing for Bond Holders.”

In this free report, you get some of the latest commentary on fixed-income markets adapted from various Elliott Wave International’s publications, including 2010 issues of Robert Prechter’s monthly Elliott Wave Theorist and its sister publication, The Elliott Wave Financial Forecast.

Enjoy this excerpt — and for details on how to read this important Club EWI report free, today, look below.

The Next Major Disaster Developing for Bond Holders
(excerpt)

The Elliott Wave Theorist — October 2010
(By Robert Prechter, EWI president)

…History shows that investors have been attracted like moths to a flame to four consecutive pyres: the NASDAQ in 2000, real estate in 2006, the blue chips in 2007 and commodities in 2008. Now they are flitting across the veranda to a mesmerizing blue flame: high yield bonds. Bonds pay high yields when the issuers are in deep trouble and cannot otherwise attract investment capital. The public is chasing a large return on capital without considering return of it. …

The Elliott Wave Financial Forecast — October 2010
(By Steve Hochberg and Pete Kendall)

The rise in optimism since early 2009 has allowed corporations to issue the lowest grade debt at a record rate, even more than in the middle of the incredible expanding debt bubble of the mid-2000s. The annual total of $189.9 billion to date is a record, and the entire fourth quarter still lies ahead.

This is a stunning testimony to just how desperate investors are for the returns they grew so accustomed to during the old bull market. The Moody’s BAA-to-Treasury spread (see chart in the free report — Ed.) has been widening since [April] and has made a series of lower highs in August and again in September. This behavior reveals an emerging preference for perceived safer debt even as junk bond issuance races higher. It is a critical non-confirmation…

Read the rest of this important report online now, free! Here’s what else you’ll learn:

• How Investors Are Looking Past Red Flags in Muni Market
• What You Should Know About Today’s “High-Grade” Bonds
• The Answer To Bond Selection
• MORE

Be Sociable, Share!

• 

As the biggest credit bubble in history continues to shrink, consumer prices have stayed flat over the past several months, meaning there is ZERO sign of inflation in the economy — despite growing commitments from the U.S. government.

So what’s keeping inflation at bay, given all the stimulus money promised? The answer: Deflation — an overwhelming urge for consumers to liquidate their assets for cash.

And this new economic phase is finally becoming too obvious to ignore, as explained in recent commentary from the world’s largest technical analysis firm.
“The economy is moving into a critical new phase, an outright deflation in which ‘prices fall because people expect falling prices.’ Obviously, this implies an element of recognition, as efforts to protect against indebtedness and falling prices contribute to further declines. We can tell deflation is entering a new stage because of the language and ideas that financial observers now use to describe it.”
– The Elliott Wave Financial Forecast (September 2010)

So how do you protect yourself from deflation? The first step is to understand it.

Elliott Wave International has put together a complimentary 90-page ebook, now updated with 30 new pages of commentary from Robert Prechter through 2010. The ebook is designed to help you prepare, adapt, survive and prosper in the event of deflation.

Prechter has spent most of the past decade as an outcast among financial forecasters, because of his certainty that deflation would soon shock virtually all investors – despite the policy makers and string-pullers who promised to prevent it.

To show you just what Prechter’s deflation forecast was up against, consider this: Experts from all schools of the economics profession said deflation was “utter nonsense,” a preoccupation of “small children,” and as likely to happen as “being eaten by piranhas.” How could deflation begin when the entire economics profession unanimously said it’s not possible?

Yet there’s no question some deflation HAS occurred. The question now is, will it get worse?

In his new 90-page ebook, you’ll see why Prechter argued deflation was likely, and why he was certain a monumental deflationary trend would unfold sooner rather than later.

Remember, deflation is extremely rare; it last happened in America almost 80 years ago. So, a forecast of deflation that proves accurate is a monumental feat – especially when all the “experts” disagree.

So if economists were unable — or worse, unwilling — to warn you in advance about the threat of deflation a few years ago, what are they not warning you about now?

It’s time you gave the deflationary scenario a serious look.

Please follow this link to get your free 90-page ebook and deflation survival guide from Robert Prechter now.

Best Regards

Be Sociable, Share!

• 

As you well know, Europe’s debt crisis has been a mainstay in the news — and in the minds of investors — over the past few months. The Greek bailout has calmed some nerves, but it has failed to recognize the true cause for the crisis, according to a new report from Elliott Wave International.

Back in February, when the modern-day Greek tragedy appeared to be contained by all media accounts, our friends at EWI anticipated yet another wave of debt woes across Europe. Here’s what EWI’s European chief market analyst, Brian Whitmer, wrote on Feb. 26:

“Greece’s woes aren’t over, and neither are its neighbors, meaning that more surprises are sure to come.”

Whitmer and his colleagues have been anticipating and tracking the growing debt crisis in Greece, Spain, Portugal and other European nations. Their analysis is so valuable and so timely right now that they’ve decided to give you their latest paid analysis on Europe in a new free report, “European Debt: An Elliott Wave Perspective.”

Their explosive five-page report is jam-packed with forecasts and analysis originally published for EWI’s paying subscribers. It shows you the real-time power of Elliott wave analysis in European markets, and it reveals what’s next for the euro and European solidarity.

For the REAL story on Europe — independent from media assumptions and conjecture — read this prescient new report from EWI.

Download your free report, “European Debt: An Elliott Wave Perspective,” now.

Be Sociable, Share!

•