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Recently many economists have warned that the global economy may suffer a double dip economy in the near future. There are reasons for their worry. Firstly, governments around the world have been pumping billions of dollars into their economies for fear that their economies will undergo a prolonged recession like the 1929 "Great Depression". The aggressive fiscal stimulus policies have been doing the wonders of a speedy V-shaped recovery for most of the economies in the world, especially the Asian countires. Secondly, the "Fear and Greed" factor in human's emotion has started to build bubbles in the stock markets and property markets around the world. Since the subprime crisis, Singapore STI up 77%, Hong Kong HSI up 65%, Indonesia JKSE up 100%, Bursa Malaysia up 50%. And property market in Singapore also see sales volume reaching its pre-crisis level. Its 2Q 2009 almost doubled 1Q 2009’s level to reach an eight-quarter high of 4,714 units. A year ago, "fear...

Warren Buffett said:"Be fearful when others are greedy; and to be greedy only when others are fearful." We know the idiom very well but how many of us know how to apply this classic idiom in the stock market? There are many indicators that track the market sentiment such as the GDP, unemployment rate, volatility index, put-call ratio and so on. Today I want to talk about one particular indicator which I think is a good representation of the sentiment of the economy as well as the stock markets - The Consumer Confidence Index (CCI). Consumer Confidence Index is an American indicator but it definitely affects the rest of the world. From the CCI we can tell whether the public sentiment is bullish or bearish. This is important because we want to know when the majority people are greedy and when they are fearful. Here's a look at the current CCI, as at August 2009 the CCI stood at 54.1, while the base year was 1985 with 100 index. The dip we saw in the chart above was regist...