I made a big mistake by going long in the market on Monday. Under ordinary circumstances, it would have been a smart move, as recent stock market performance has been performing more poorly lately than a 1,000 comparable situations mathematically. Unfortunately, the problem with this market is -- it's failing to conform to statistical niceties these days.

Take for example the two unprecedented moves that the Federal Reserve Board took today. One action virtually guarantees commercial paper, an action that hasn't even been remotely tried since the Great Depression. The second action was the historic unified rate cuts of the US, Canada, Switzerland, Sweden, the UK, Australia, and the European Union. When I thought that I had a confident position, by the time I got to the gym, I found that the Dow had violated a huge support level, and I experienced a 13% loss overnight. I pulled the ripcord before the market opened, as I was looking at the charts and seeing what the FRB had seen. If Bernacke & Co. hadn't taken this kind of action today, the Dow could have easily fallen anywhere between 2,000 and 5,000 points in one day.

The good news is, that this (and future actions) of the Fed will give us a nastier, deeper, longer recession than anything we've had since 1974. The bad news is, it will be many months, perhaps even years before this country experiences anything close to prosperity as the pain radiates out of the money centers onto Main Street and beyond.

Now if this were an ordinary market, the Dow would have been up 800 points or more today. Instead, the Dow only lost 190 points.