In order to prevent possible food borne illness, you need to have a strategy to keep food safe. Your game plan should include preparing your food for an environment where a stove, a refrigerator, or running water is not readily available. Make sure you pack enough clean utensil for eating and serving the food. You may bring a thermometer along to make sure the food you server is cooked thoroughly. If you serve uncooked meats harmful bacteria can cause serious illness.
Make sure you keep the food hot. Do not eat hot take-out food more than two hours after purchase. It is best to chill the food in a refrigerator before packing for your tailgate party. To keep food like soup, chili, and stew hot, use an insulated container.
Fill the container pre-heated with boiling water, and let it stand for a few minutes. Once you have emptied the preheated food container put in the hot food. Keep the insulated container closed to keep the food hot (140 F or above) for several hours.
Bring perishable food like hamburger meat, sausages, and chicken in an insulated cooler packed with several inches of ice, frozen gel packs. Other perishable cooked food such as cooked sausages, pasta, and potato must be kept refrigerator cold, too. When packing the cooler for a tailgate party, make sure raw meat and poultry are wrapped securely to prevent their juices from cross-contaminating ready-to-eat food. Actually, it is best to keep raw meat and poultry in a separate icebox from other foods. If there is no drink quality water, bring water for cleaning. Also, bring wet disposable cloths for cleaning hands and surfaces.
At your next tailgate party make sure you keep hot food hot and cold food cold. Bacteria multiply rapidly between 40 F and 140 F. Avoid leaving food in this danger zone more than 2 hours (1 hour when the outside temperature is above 90 F). Cook meat and poultry completely.
Many people have so much fun at tailgate parties that they never make it into the stadium to see game. Regardless of when and where you eat the food you brought to the party, it doesnt mean its safe for the food to stay unrefrigerated. Store food in the cooler as much as you can and only leave it out briefly while serving. Cook only the amount of food that will be eaten to avoid the challenge of keeping leftovers at a safe temperature. Do not consume any leftovers that are not ice cold after the game.
Want to get rich in a bear market? Sounds crazy, right? Not to those who understand that bear markets move much faster than bull markets, and by switching to a few simple strategies, can make them as much or more than they earned in the prceeding bull market. It is actually quite simple to do, but will take a slight shift in your way of investment thinking.
A little background about bear markets first.
Bear markets rarely come on suddenly. You will have many warnings and equally many opportunities to protect your portfolio from at risk positions. You will also have enough time to position yourself in solid money making strategies that will continue to profit, even during the steepest of bearish trends.
The bear market signals will be subtle at first; earnings reports, general market news, and the overall economy will continue to sound good and healthy, but underneath that good news, an erosion of little followed market numbers will be taking place. They will not make financial news headlines, but their deterioration will be a key indicator to the bear trend looming just over the horizon.
Indices will still be reaching new highs or challenging old ones, and bullish talk will overshadow almost all other discussion. Ride the bull during this time for as long as it lasts, but keep raising your stops, you are going to need them fairly soon.
Keep an eye on the volume as new highs are formed. When the market is getting ready to turn, you will see volume start to wane with each new impulse to higher highs. Institutions, who had been buyers on every dip all the way up, will begin to take profits at new highs. Just a little at first, as they will be careful not reveal their selling hand. As more buyers continue to jump in to the bull they don't want to miss, along with expectations of even higher highs, institutional traders will use their enthusiasm to unload even more shares.
You will know the underlying deterioration is broadening by keeping an eye on the number of stocks making new highs. When indices reached those new highs, the number of individual stocks achieving that same status probably exceeded 400-500 a day. When that number begins to slip - perhaps down to the 300 range, consider it as another indication that stronger profit taking is underway.
All of this may continue for several weeks. But that early profit taking is eventually going to turn into panic profit taking, especially when economic news starts looking less brilliant. Suddenly, stocks will begin to break support levels and key moving averages. Watch for initial breaks on the indices below their 5, 30, and 50 day moving avearges. When each is violated to the downside, a wave of more precipitous selling will be triggered, and those averages will begin to trend downward as well.
Expect bounces at or near those key average levels too. No stock or market goes straight down, and computerized trading is set to do a little buying each time those levels are reached. Markets may stall or even bounce back from those averages, but each minor recovery rally in a growing bear trend will quickly turn into another selling opportunity for institutional traders. After all, smart money buys the dips on the way up, and then sells the rallies on the way down.
Before things get carried away in a downside sell-off, here's a few things you should always make sure to do. First, in your 401K or IRA, move into money markets or other safe havens like government bond funds. Cash will be king at this point, so do not be afraid to take those profits off the table when you first see the signs of the bear market developing. Then, use that knowledge to buy commodity stocks or commodity ETF's like the DBC, or IAU, or to buy inverse ETF's like the the QID, DXD, SDS, SRS, SKF etc. Each of those will actually move up when markets trend down. In other words, by owning those, you will be turning a bear market into a bull market and your portfolio profits will reflect your genius.
Those ETFs are bought and sold just like any other stock and don't require special trading knowledge or permission as do options. To show you their profit-ability, here is how they performed in the bear trend from October 2007 to March 2008: QID $34 -$54, DXD $45-$61, SDS $48-$68. Those were substantial gains earned while the Dow fell from 14166 to 11800 (as of this writing), and the NASDAQ dropped from 2861 to 2195.
There a several other things including option and futures strategies that can profitably be traded in a bear market, but I'll save that discussion for a future article. In the meantime, economic hard times should NEVER mean you have to lose money, in fact, while everyone is bemoaning upcoming bad economic times, it should be one of the easiest of times to strengthen and enrich your financial future. It's all a matter of how you choose to look at it, and trade it!
Both George Meszaros & Stephen Swanson are contributors for EditorialToday. The above articles have been edited for relevancy and timeliness. All write-ups, reviews, tips and guides published by EditorialToday.com and its partners or affiliates are for informational purposes only. They should not be used for any legal or any other type of advice. We do not endorse any author, contributor, writer or article posted by our team.
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