Average Stock Ownership Time Period

Average stock ownership: 22 seconds

The average time a stock is held is 22 seconds. But that's an improvement from a year ago, when it was 20 seconds, according to analyst Michael Hudson, an economics professor at the University of Missouri.

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How can the individual investor compete with that?

Doctor: I have some good news and some bad news.
Patient: Hit me with the bad news.
Doctor: You need to be leeched.
Patient: Leeched? Yikes! What's the good news?
Doctor: 200 years ago we might have used several dozen leeches repeatedly for several weeks. Using the miracle of modern medical technology we can now place millions of leeches on you for just 22 seconds.
Patient: Why must this be done?
Doctor: You are choking and there's a problem with your life blood.

September 24, 2008
'Grave threats'

"Credit will be restricted further. That's not just an inconvenience; that will affect spending and economic activity," he said in response to one question. "It will affect the unemployment rate. It will affect real incomes. It will affect everybody's standard of living."

"It's about the overall performance of the U.S. economy over perhaps a period of years," Bernanke added. "The choking up of credit is like taking away the life blood away from the economy."

Bloodletting

One typical course of medical treatment began the morning of 13 July 1824. A French sergeant was stabbed through the chest while engaged in single combat; within minutes, he fainted from loss of blood. Arriving at the local hospital he was immediately bled twenty ounces (570 ml) "to prevent inflammation". During the night he was bled another 24 ounces (680 ml). Early the next morning, the chief surgeon bled the patient another 10 ounces (285 ml); during the next 14 hours, he was bled five more times. Medical attendants thus intentionally removed more than half of the patient's normal blood supply—in addition to the initial blood loss which caused the sergeant to faint. Bleedings continued over the next several days. By 29 July, the wound had become inflamed. The physician applied 32 leeches to the most sensitive part of the wound. Over the next three days, there were more bleedings and a total of 40 more leeches. The sergeant recovered and was discharged on 3 October. His physician wrote that "by the large quantity of blood lost, amounting to 170 ounces [nearly eleven pints] (4.8 liters), besides that drawn by the application of leeches [perhaps another two pints] (1.1 liters), the life of the patient was preserved". By nineteenth-century standards, thirteen pints of blood taken over the space of a month was a large but not an exceptional quantity. The medical literature of the period contains many similar accounts-some successful, some not.

The bloodletting will continue until morale improves.