November 11 Edition

Good Morning All,

Yesterday's promising start generated by news of the Asian stimulus package quickly rolled over into despair after further doubts about the viability of America's financial institutions. More money for AIG, AMEX having to become a bank and the ongoing disintegration of the automotive industry combined to set the tone for bad vibrations. Generally I believe that Mondays and Fridays should be ignored when volume is low and new news is not a huge issue. So don't sell the China story short because their 600 billion expenditure is very real and very important. Remember also that Washington won't be rebuilt in a day and neither will Wall Street, but construction has begun.

Each Remembrance Day should give us time to pause and think of the living as well as those who have gone on before. On that note I will begin with the former. If there is such a thing as a famous Canadian military historian my much older brother Terry fits the description. Terry returned from a research trip to Italy in October and underwent a successful bypass procedure from which he is recovering nicely. Many of his former students at Loyola, Concordia, McGill and Sir Wilfred Laurier remember him as their favourite history professor. Many Canadian veterans have also been rewarded by his interest in their personal histories, we wish him well.

Many of us have our own connections to the wars of this and the last century, as for myself I would like to mention my longtime friend Elizabeth Gallagher Tremblay who spent D Day in the middle of the North Atlantic on her way to overseas duty. My able associate, Jason Graves' grandfather Ernie Evans who survived 30 some missions as a tail gunner in World War ll, and to my own father Oswald Meredith who missed the big show due to a heart murmer caused by a childhood bout with rheumatic fever. I on the other hand have only been blessed by a lifelong addiction to romantic fever, something I may have been unable to experience had my Dad gone to war and there had been no I.

Watch oil for a break toward 50$ and the financials to start showing some stability. Once again....financials lead markets up and down. The down began 20 months ago which is a long time in market life.

"Two men look through the same bars, One sees the mud, one the stars"

Frederick Langbridge