It's a slaughterhouse...

Thursday and Friday were just a sea of red on the JSE... Before I get into the reasons and try and pick my way through the carnage, I thought I should post the following picture to try and put some sense of humour into the story:
I think that's the closest I could come to Mr Market giving you the middle finger if you were tempted to go long.

Friday saw our markets rocked by some shocking news from Anglo American as they announced another 9000 job cuts and declined to pay a dividend. Ferronews.com has more info. The miner was down over 15% and some serious questions are going to be asked about the amount of debt the company is carrying... Don't be surprised if this isn't the last bad news to come into the market from this company.

On the financials side, Old Mutual got caned again and between Thursday and Friday they came down over 16%. The company managed to recover a couple of percent late in the day but it was really one way traffic. I remember calling Old Mutual as a R5 company and sure enough we got down to the R5.60 level so I think I'll take that one....

Basically this is how the indexes played out on Friday:
ALL SHARE 19403 -3.28 %
TOP 40 17464 -3.41 %
INDUSTRIAL 14800 -3.31 %
FINANCIAL 4826 -5.15 %
GOLD 2906 1.59 %

The US didn't get any better and gold spent a lot of US time above the $1000 an ounce levels. Remember I'm looking at levels of around 6500 - 6800 on the Dow in the next few months before I expect selling pressure to abate.

The Dow closed 100 points down at 7365 but had been down around the 7230 level...

Warning
Rumour mongering isn't really my thing but I think that there are some investors out there who will try and take some high risk positions simply because "Things can't go any lower..."

We are in a really bad economic situation at the moment - don't take unnecessary high risk positions that you don't need to take.

Two companies in particular I'd warn to steer clear of.

IFCA - I noticed the company traded down from 10c to 1c before somebody came into the market and bought 100 shares at 1c to boost it back to a 10c share.... steer clear

Super Group - I've been hearing some very bad things about this business beyond what is in the press and I believe an asset sale is on the cards. Basically their financial wellbeing sits with a banker deciding whether or not to process a high risk loan and we know what the lending environment is like at the moment.