Unlikely. Karsai is a replaceable figure head. If you look at a year-to-date plot of the DOW, you will see a fairly regular cycle over several months. If you stare at it creatively, you can easily convince yourself that today (give or take a day) is when a new month-long cycle starts with a couple of weeks of upward motion. I have no provable explanation. However, if I were to guess, I would say that, because much of the total market volume represents programmed trading by very large concerns (our friends and clients, the bangsters) and they most likely don't vastly change their software rapidly, the market can be expected to settle into a more or less regular rhythm which is the output of this set of machines working together (they don't really want them to work together, but that's what tends to happen). One can assume that any major event, and Karzai's default confirmation is not one of them, would probably cause a back-to-the-drawingboard movement among those big players and a new pattern would be established.

Since all the big players seem to usually all win, and capital gains are a zero-sum game, one has to conclude that the contribution of the retail investors is to provide the funds needed for a net gain by the big guys. Guess we retail investors are like blood doners.

Nowhere in my equity valuation model is there a toggle for "Karzai".