Dedicated short sellers tend to be among the smarter investors on the Street,

Be patient - there's the rarest thing on Wall Street.

Consumers are clearly being impacted by the three hurricanes, ... That, combined with natural gas and gasoline prices, is having an effect. I think $3 a gallon gasoline is the tipping point to a consumer that is under siege. But this number is really no great surprise.

If you think you can recklessly buy stocks you have to be assuming more than a V-shaped recovery in earnings -- you have to be assuming a hockey-stick shaped recovery.

Yet you can make good money in that environment. It just takes a different strategy; you try to hold a core bunch of stocks you think are in secular bull markets and trade at inflection points.

The cheerleaders talk about the economy growing, but the economy grew at 7 percent from 1966 to 1982, while stocks went nowhere because valuations were too optimistic. And they're optimistic now, by historic measurements.