Risk minimization requires the identification of what’s inside a portfolio. Risk control requires decision-making by the owner of the investment assets. Risk management requires a selection process from a universe of securities that meet a known set of qualitative standards.

Why do we jump through all of these “prevent-defense” hoops? Because we just don’t know how or have the patience to design and manage a classic, safer, plain vanilla, stocks and bonds portfolio. The market cycle is the favorite son of the investment gods. You either make it your friend or fail as an investor!

A correction is a beautiful thing, simply the flip side of a rally, big or small. Theoretically, even technically I’m told, corrections adjust equity prices to their actual value or support levels. In reality, it’s much easier than that. Here’s a list of ten things to think about doing, or to avoid doing, during corrections of any magnitude:

Dow industrials recoup some after near 1,000-point plunge
By Kate Gibson, MarketWatch
NEW YORK (MarketWatch) — U.S. stocks caved on Thursday, with the Dow industrials making a comeback of sorts from a drop of nearly 1,000 points, as Europe’s financial troubles took hold on Wall Street.
At its height, the major stock [...]

By George Parker and Lionel Barber

Gordon Brown said on Wednesday the world’s leading economies were close to agreeing a global bank tax, amid hopes in Downing Street that a deal can be concluded at the G20 summit in Canada in June.
Mr Brown believes that opinion has shifted decisively in favour of a globally co-ordinated tax [...]

By George Russell
The World Health Organization (WHO) is considering a plan to ask governments to impose a global consumer tax on such things as Internet activity or everyday financial transactions like paying bills online.
Such a scheme could raise “tens of billions of dollars” on behalf of the United Nations’ public health arm from a broad [...]

Catherine Philp in Washington

Confidential intelligence documents obtained by The Times show that Iran is working on testing a key final component of a nuclear bomb.
The notes, from Iran’s most sensitive military nuclear project, describe a four-year plan to test a neutron initiator, the component of a nuclear bomb [...]

By Andrew Gilligan | Published: 10:55PM GMT 05 Dec 2009

On a normal day, Majken Friss Jorgensen, managing director of Copenhagen’s biggest limousine company, says her firm has twelve vehicles on the road. During the “summit to save the world”, which opens here tomorrow, she will have [...]

Sunday, December 6, 2009 9:51 AM
President Barack Obama’s national security adviser says the door remains open for Iran to work with other countries on its nuclear program. But James Jones also says the “picture is not a good one.”
Jones says the clock is ticking toward the end of the year. That’s when Obama has said [...]

By Walker Simon Walker Simon – Sun Nov 29, 6:43 pm ET
CARACAS (Reuters) – Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez said on Sunday he could nationalize private banks unless they comply with the law, adding he had “no problem with that because the banks don’t want to extend credit to the poor.”
In a broadcast from nationalized farmland [...]