I don’t know if you feel as battle weary as I do but it seems the onslaught of bad news is relentless. Turn on the TV, read the papers, talk to your friends its all negative. It is hard to keep up with each developing crisis.

 I never went along with the theory that talking about recessions was a self fulfilling prophesy but I am coming round to the idea. So in the midst of all this mayhem is there a ray of hope something that can stop the bleeding.

Traditionally stock markets anticipate the end of a recession by six months. Whilst we are still dealing with all the problems the markets start to move up on the green shoots of recovery. There is little sign of this at the moment as the Dow Jones Industrial Index hovers around 8,000 not far away from the October 10th low.

 A more promising statistic brought to my attention at a recent Jupiter investment managers conference related to the duration of recessions. Courtesy of ISI statistics were compiled to measure the duration of each recession since. The second longest was 43 months from August 1929. From 1919-1945 the average was 18 months, and for the period 1945-2001 the average was 10 months. If we take our recession starting in December 2007 we may have already completed 12 months.

 The key things to remember for private investors is even in down times investment opportunities exist and when your portfolio is showing losses endeavor to limit those losses so you have a strong base moving forward.

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