Is now the time to build a bearish position to prepare for sell off?

It depends on what you mean by a "sharp sell off". The retail investor is 90%+ out of the market. A "sharp sell off" nowadays won't be the gentle descent of 2007 - 2008 but instead be an algo driven mad shark feeding frenzy. Not months, but hours long. Maybe minutes. Not a fan of SOXS, FAZ, or TZA. Those triple inverse ETFs only track correctly for a few days at a time, and, if held, loose you money compared to an option. Day Trade them only. The algos are all over these leveraged ETFs and will eat your lunch. The volume charts are enough evidence this is so. Remember that an hour for you is a million hours for them - one hour for you is 115 YEARS for them. Newmont is not a "weeks or months" buy yet, the Big Boys ran it up following QEInfinity but it looks like the trading trend ("hours" to "days") is negative to me. I think it is a good stock that is not yet a buy. If you are willing to hold it through thick and thin I think you could be nicely in the money in two or three years. Since QEInfinity was priced into the market it looks to me that Mr. Market is waiting for the other shoe to drop. The elections are too close for anyone to stick his neck out. Also QEInfinity will have simply terrible "unforeseen" consequences. ("Unforeseen" except by Peter Schiff, Marc Faber, Jim Rogers, Doug Noland, Michael Burry, lots and lots of other financial world big shots, and me, I guess.) Speaking of QEInfinity I was optimistic that the FED would not do anything so stupid in any case whatever. Whenever I make mistakes they are lulus. And usually my mistake is to hold human nature in too high regard. Arrogant, conceited, stupid fools. Oh, yeah, QE has made the rich much richer, and the rest of us poorer. Just another tax on the little guy. Whenever you buy food or gasoline remember that the high prices are caused by the diluted dollar. Bernanke and his posse are trying to put out a burning city with fire hoses charged with gasoline. Or maybe they know what they are doing? That is a truly terrible thought.

International Trading Indexes Signal Trouble

The Baltic Dry Index http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baltic_Dry_Index "The Baltic Dry Index (BDI) is a number issued daily by the London-based Baltic Exchange. Not restricted to Baltic Sea countries, the index provides "an assessment of the price of moving the major raw materials by sea. Taking in 23 shipping routes measured on a timecharter basis, the index covers Handysize, Supramax, Panamax, and Capesize dry bulk carriers carrying a range of commodities including coal, iron ore and grain." BDI is based on what it costs per ship day in $USD to move dry bulk cargo. The index is a very sensitive read on international bulk products trade rate changes. Think of it as a reliable and sensitive indicator of the way the world economy is going raw material flow rate wise. Another useful shipping indicator is the HARPEX http://www.harperpetersen.com/harpex/harpexVP.do which is based on the cost of moving the standard twenty foot long intermodal shipping container over various routes by various sized container ships. This index tracks the rate of change of the volume of finished goods being shipped by sea. As you can see by examining these indexes the world economy has slowed markedly since Q1 2011 and is now bumping along the bottom with no sign of rebounding. Yesterdays FedEx guidance and earlier UPS guidance shows decline in the flow rate of goods over this same time period. You realize that if the Federal Treasury and Federal Reserve had not diluted the $USD since 2000 so that the 2012 dollar is now worth sixty cents in 2000 dollars that gasoline would still be $2.25 a gallon at the pump? That means that the rise in the price of gasoline is not caused by "peak oil" but by money dilution? That that money dilution was making the Consumer Price Index over the past thirty years indicate inflation, as you would expect, but that the way this was fixed was by repeatedly redefining the CPI? That the situation is now so bad that the Federal Reserve ignores Energy and Food prices in inflation rate measurement, calling the resultant number "the core inflation rate"? That this mis-measured inflation rate means that when GDP and other aggregates are reported over time in "constant dollars" that "constant dollars" are not being used at all; when you do correct, as well as possible, for constant dollars, you find that the United States has been in recession for the last twelve years, somewhat masked by insanely low credit interest rates, which resulted in debts we cannot repay now and will be even less able to cope with in the future. So Bernanke tries to borrow his way out of this fix. If you are head over heels in debt more debt is not going to help but only hurt. Boy, is this ever going to get ugly.