These are the best and the worst of times for any investor. It depends on how you see. Fortunes can be made or lost. Online stock trading means a lot more now than it did even two years ago, but only if you are serious.

Online stock trading and options and all its assets can mean survival of your portfolio or can mean tremendous gains. You have to use the tools available.

First, like an online broker, you need an understanding of the market conditions.

I don’t think there is a soul alive today who can tell you how this will all play out. These are most bizarre times.

Banks and financial institutions all across the world are struggling. Not all, of course. But enough where the grease of the modern financial and business sectors — credit– is not being applied freely enough. The parts are starting to grate against each other, creating –not heat, in this case– a chill.

A big chill.

Unlike the first part of the 20 Century, where many business were smaller and funded their growth through their own profits, we in the 21 Century have come to rely on credit as the catalyst for not only starting the concern but for stoking the engines of expansion.

With credit at a premium, only the strong are surviving. Few are flourishing.

Some of the strong are the national governments and their central banks, but even those face troubles. Iceland, for instance, is in a national crisis right now, with a run on its currency.

There are those who believe that markets should be pure, and those businesses and companies and banks that made poor choices should be allowed to fail.

Others will argue that some institutions are too big to fail.

Both arguments have merit.

At the end of the day, the choices made now are going to effect online stock trading and investing for quite some time.

Still, can anybody really afford to take a “let’s wait and see” approach and bury their assets under the figurative mattress of treasury bills or bonds? Or even in gold bullion or stocks?

Not if they want any standard of living in the future. A large baby boom demographic is nearing an age where they thought they might be sitting on the beach somewhere in a third home. Clearly, this will not be the case for the majority of those dreamers.

But if they work at it and are intelligent, they can leverage their portfo-lio for the best.

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