:: front page welcome updated June 14, 2002        Hello and welcome to 'off on a tangent', my entire life in the form of a website. My name is Scott Bradford and since 1995 I've had a personal web presence, growing through each iteration to eventually become the central information pool that you see here today. I don't hold much back, so pretty much everything there is to know about me is somewhere on this site. Give it a look, hopefully it isn't too boring ;-)
	what's up!? powered by LiveJournal this would be my livejournal. use your imagination! visit the full what's up!? page to read past entries.		front page rant updated July 26, 2002 Of Stocks and Prognostication        Well, fortunately or not it's now time for me to chime in on the stock market. I've bitten my tongue for years, biding my time and waiting to see how firm my understanding of the stock trading systems were. Now, looking back, it is utterly clear to me that when I first started making predictions about the market in the year 2000 I was right on the money (or, at least, I would've been were I an investor).        I actually have a friend who invests in the market, buying and selling chunks of whatever companies they feel good about. I was talking to him in October or November of 2000 and he recommended that I start to play the market, to which I explained that I would consider doing so in when the market crashed in 1-to-3 years and the stocks were cheap.        He told me I was crazy because there would be no crash in 1-to-3 years.        Now I hate to be the one to say "I told you so", except for the fact that I did tell him so. The markets are at their lowest levels in years, and the trend of negative Dow Jones Industrial averages and such seems to be in the process of firmly establishing itself for a while (aside the occasional gains, of course). It's been just under two years since I made my prediction, and I was 100% correct.        The fact is that no matter how rosy things might look, the good times will only go so far before they go bad. Luckily, however, the bad things follow the same pattern. Surely, on the whole, things always get better - but the process of long-term improvement is marked by a stream of ups and downs, good times and bad, happy times and sad. The long-term growth pattern of the economy of the United States can best be described as "two steps forward, one step back" - as in, after every huge growth period, there is a recession that knocks it back a level or two.        For those who weren't paying attention, the 1990's were a huge growth period. Under the sound economic policies of Ronald Reagan which remained nearly unchanged through the Bush (#1) and Clinton presidencies (most aren't aware that Alan Greenspan, the chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, was a Reagen appointee) the economy reached heights that had previously been unheard of. Everybody was riding high on a tidal wave of PimentoLoaf.com stocks and most everything else.        Like many growth periods, there was a certain amount of honest economic change and a certain amount of... continued on page 2   Previous editions of the Front Page Rant can now be found in the writings section.