Here are comments from stock market Professionals who are very good, and not always bullish to raise money, but Professionals who trade both ways and don’t care what the direction of the market is.

Stock ‘Party to Go on For Long Time’: Laszlo Birinyi

Hedge fund guru Barton Biggs, managing partner at Traxis Partners, predicted a surge in equities in 2011 on Tuesday, Jan 11^th. Biggs gained notoriety in 2001 for stating that “hedge fund mania” was fueling a speculative bubble which would eventually go pop. Now investors listen to him.

Jan 31 2011, - Jim O’Neill, the chairman of Goldman Sachs Asset Management and the man who coined the term BRICs, says this is “the year of the U.S. comeback.” Meanwhile, Bob Doll, (same link as Jim O’Neill above) chief equity strategist for fundamental equities at BlackRock, says we should expect “a nice surprise” from U.S. equities. Is it time to put your inner bear back in its cage and make a big bet on U.S stocks?

LOTM: In watching too much Bloomberg TV and CNBC, one theme I’m picking up is there’s a lot of cash on the sidelines that wants to get in this market, and is hoping for a deeper correction to get that money to work. Usually that means the correction does’nt go too deep. Smaller companies should do well, and perhaps extraordinary, but one might want to accumulate the biggies like Intel (INTC), General Electric (GE) and Microsoft (MSFT) that have been flat for the last decade.

A more conservative and passive approach would be to buy market indexes/ETFs NASDAQ 100 (QQQQ) or the S&P 500 (SPY). Our heart is with individual companies rather than indexed funds, but ETF’s are great for certain goals. The main goal for owning an index fund is being a broad and diversified way to catch a big trend. The S&P 500 is at 1286.5 – Birinyi is projecting (in the link above) a move in the S&P 500 to the 2500 area by 2013 time period.

Currently, an account related to LOTM is short Gold using the ETF DZZ Deutsche Bank AG DB Gold Double Short ETN.

Our reason for being short Gold is strictly technical. We are not smart enough to wade through all the arguments, pro and con, about owning or not owning Gold. Gold, as with the other ETF’s, tends to move ahead of the actual news and events anyway. If we can monitor the price action with simple price crossing moving average technical analysis, perhaps we can catch a trend if a trend develops.  Let’s look at Gold as a real trade for us as well as an example of what we are trying to accomplish.

DZZ Deutsche Bank AG DB Gold Double Short ETN

DZZ is an inverse ETF for Gold, meaning that it goes up in price as Gold comes down in price. It is a mirror image of Gold’s price movement. The double short means that DZZ is leveraged to be twice the movement as the actual move in Gold.

Our primary trigger for buying and selling when trading is the price of the DZZ crossing its respective moving averages. In the chart below, we have the 50-day moving average, the 150-day moving average and the 200-day moving average. DZZ‘s price has crossed above its 50-day moving averages signaling a short-to-intermediate term trend upwards (downwards in the actual price of Gold). In order to signal a change of the long-term trend of Gold, the price of DZZ would need to cross above its 150-day and or its 200-day moving average. At this time, we can only say that Gold is in a short-to-intermediate term correction. That’s how we are viewing Gold at this time: as a trade for the short term.

We suggest you, without exception, use a stop loss if the trade goes against your position. In this case, a stop loss at about 10% below your cost is suggested to exit the trade. Our upside target is not established yet. Please change your stop loss to be 10% below any new intraday high on the prices of DZZ. In that way, you can follow the share price higher and still keep your stop loss relevant to the changing price. A second exit strategy would be to sell at a close of the price below its 50-day moving average. On the upside, we would like to suggest you try to allow the price to rise as much as possible; we are trying to catch a trend. Trading targets on the upside of the current price are at the resistance levels of $8.92 – $9.24 and $10.52. Resistance levels can be located at www.stockTA.com.

*An account related to LOTM has a position in this security. Neither LOTM nor Tom Linzmeier is a Registered Investment Advisor. Please refer to our full disclosure in the Subscriber Agreement.

The following analysis comes from the Tax Foundation, based on the most recent IRS data.

In 2008, the last year for which hard data are available, the top 1% of the nation’s adjusted gross income(AIG) earners earned 20% of the total national income. Those are the truly wealthy. And they paid 38% of the nation’s taxes.

That year, the top 10% of the nation’s AGI earners earned 45.77% of the income, but they paid in 69.64% of the total taxes paid that year.

In fact, the top 50% of the nation’s AGI earners, earned 87.25% of the total income but they paid in 97.30% of the total income taxes. Full Story

LOTM: It seems that the political focus should be incentivized to increase the wages of the bottom 50% (increase their tax percent of the whole), while holding the line, or reducing the tax (as a percent of the whole) for the top 50%. If we don’t, we will not exist as a democracy. Another way to say this is: we have to re-build our middle class.