I know it seems incredible that the market can still go lower, but I'm afraid it will.

It does not inspire confidence when the U. S. administration believes that the economic plans are showing results. I suppose it is true if the aim of their plans was to deepen the recession. But I thought they were trying to stimulate the economy.

Furthermore, Obama's statement made me go “huh?” It really showed how clueless everyone in Washington D.C. is about the market and how unqualified they are in giving investment advice to people:

What you're now seeing is profit and earning ratios are starting to get to the point where buying stocks is a potentially good deal if you've got a long-term perspective on it.

I hate to ask, but what are “profit and earning ratios”?

The only ratio with P & E that I know of is the P/E ratio, a.k.a. P(rice) / E(earnings) ratio. In business lingo profit and earning are more or less the same thing, so it's a bit odd to create a ratio out of those two because the result will always be “1”. Also looking purely at the P/E ratio to evaluate any particular company stock's potential is utterly ridiculous. There are so many variables to consider, and historical performance is not indicative of future performance.

Furthermore, earnings (a.k.a. profit a.k.a. income) should be regarded with skepticism. There are many ways to fudge the data and adopt different types of amortization schedules and so on to either inflate or deflate income. This means you must read the notes and do some heavy-duty calculation (meaning accounting) yourself to ensure that the earnings data you're using for Company A is truly comparable to other companies within the same industry and so on.

This is why IMHO the most important financial statement is not the balance sheet or income statement, but the cash flow statement. If you don't have enough cash to operate your business you will go bankrupt (unless you're “too big to fail”). You'd be amazed at the kind of insight you can gain by looking at a company's cash flow statement.

Anyway, I'll be holding onto my cash until the market has truly hit the bottom.