General Pickett, where is your division?

As in all our to-ing and fro-ing, the winners get to write history. What if Lee had prevailed at Gettysburg? All the Price/Earnings ratios and adjusted P/Es and adjusted/adjusted P/Es will tell you whatever you want them to tell you. Not that it isn't fun, like debating whether Gatorade and steroids are both performance-enhancing drugs. It makes for great cocktail chatter and a way to get a conversation going.

My own historical analysis is: stock prices attempt to discount the future. If enough investors see inflation-adjusted economic growth they will bid up the price of equity securities until they see evidence they are wrong. Thus, the biggest winners will be those who serendipitously guess the crowd is wrong or right.

So many money managers have been proven wrong that one must doubt the value of granular research. I would rather rely on the outlook for macro trends and look for specific stocks that could benefit from them than the parsing of the P/E de jour.

Prediction: Economic growth, through revived animal spirits via fiscal and monetary stimulus, will resume at some point in the second half of 2009 and equity prices will be higher on Feb. 13, 2010, than they are today. If not, then the survivalists are right and expect committees of correspondence and the Sons of Liberty to see a revival.

Self-interest without an overriding interest in the welfare of clients would tend to hurt the commonweal, but isn't self-interest the overarching inclination of our, or any, species? In other words, self-interest must be overcome by the damage to the whole, and therefore to the self, before the repair to the damage can be applied. We've reached it now, in my view. Self-interest means saving the whole, even sluggards like me who wonder why the world doesn't support a poor man who only asks for drink, tobacco, golf clubs, tennis racket and gambling venue in return for his gracing this vale of tears.

To blame Wall Street is acceptable but not sufficient. Used car salesmen will always be with us. It is a condition of life, not a symptom of something gone off the tracks, in my view. Just a swinging of the pendulum.

For example, I can't stand the vile lyrics booming from the stereos of cars of young people. Is it a sign of the apocalypse? Yeah, I think so, and would advocate shotguns being fired into their engine blocks. But a lot of people don't, and I guess the republic will survive this plague.

Growth is in the pipeline and will wash over the individual broker's incentive. Stocks tied to the macro trends will rise. I'm thinking oil, technology. In my view these trends are reinflation through fiscal and monetary stimulus. Now, inflation will be something to contemplate down the road.

The she-wolf called Miss Market spanked me again today, largely because of an investment in an illiquid banking stock, BANF. Those who want to take profits in PALM and AMD will be forgiven, but I'm hanging on. The latter rose, the former retreated today.

The possibility of nationalization of big banks is real. I am an owner of C and JPM, waiting for an exit. Those with cojones might want to take a flier on these guys, but I'm not increasing positions.

Also, my MSFT has done well. S is in the black. GE and NYT have disappointed. But the ex-dividend dates for both are coming up next week, so I'm hanging on at least until then.

SLV has been a winner so far, as has AMR, which I am hedging with DXO (more about the nexus between airlines, oil and economic growth to come).

Happy Presidents' Day (is the apostrophe in the right place?). Though the holiday is meant to commemorate the births of Washington and Lincoln, my hero, as befits a baby boomer, remains JFK. His explanation for going to the moon keeps me dashing to the golf course and the tennis court. "Why does Rice play Texas?"