Ugly day in the financial markets.  Everything is being marked down.  "Not a good sign when both bonds and stocks are going down", my old mentor would say.  Simply put, today is a day when the markets are reassessing the price of financial assets and pricing them such that the forward (expected) return is higher.

This can continue for a little while, but I do not believe there is much behind it as there is still a lot of liquidity in the market and no sign of it going away any time soon.

Long dated TIPS are getting close...  1.45% real yield or so.  At 2, I move a good amount in.  Even here I am thinking of swapping some of my TLT for the actual TIPS bonds.

Updating my favorite metric, with current forward PE of about 15 on the S&P and 10 year bond yields around 2.77 the spread of stocks over bonds is about 3.8% which is as low as it's been in a while, but it's STILL an attractive place to be long stocks.

Only 2 out of 13 years where the premium has been over 2% have resulted in negative stock returns (1966 and 1974).  I like the odds and I will be looking for ways to increase equity exposure.  JNJ is down almost 4% from where I sold it a few days ago.  That's probably a good discount on a great stock.  AAPL has bounced nicely, but it's still cheap and I think ultimately it will pay off from these levels.  I keep thinking JCP is a good buy, but it is very risky, although it probably doesn't have much more downside than in the 12's.