In about a week or so, the longest presidential campaign in election history will finally come to a close. A winner will be named and we can finally go about the business of solving the many issues that lay before us.

We are well into the current earnings release season. Many companies have already reported and the news has been mostly negative. Although results have been mixed, guidance is the one constant.

If you have a long-term horizon, there really are some interesting stocks to buy in this market environment. One sector that looks particularly attractive is the chemical space.

No country in the world has been spared from the wrath of the global financial crisis. Stock markets have sold off. Economic growth has slowed. And confidence has plunged. But China is actually less vulnerable to the financial storm and may fare the crisis relatively unscathed. Let me explain why.

There is simply too much risk for more downside corrections in the current market. Are there companies that you must own irrespective of the operating environment? I would say there is one: Apple, Inc. (AAPL).

Yahoo's (YHOO) failure to consummate a deal with Microsoft (MSFT) will go down as one of the most obvious destructions of value seen in a long time.

I can appreciate that people are upset about losses in the stock market, but I can't say I didn't tell you so. You can lead a horse to water, but you cannot make him drink comes to mind.

Texas Instruments (TXN), one of the bellwether tech firms, released it quarterly earnings report this week and the news was not pretty.

For those that ride the wave of speculative frenzies, huge profits can be had. A great example of this can be seen in the huge boom in commodity prices. 

If your broker or financial advisor did not significantly reduce your exposure to stocks before the latest purge in the Dow, he or she should be immediately fired.

Companies that thrived on consumer borrowing have struggled during the recent credit crunch with much of the focus on those providing home mortgages. What about the credit card companies?

For many years now, Halliburton Co. (HAL) has been the poster child for all that is wrong with the Bush administration. From trading in the single digits in 2002, the large oil and gas service company has been propelled forward by policies that greatly favored oil companies.

MAT released earnings for its third quarter this week that missed Wall Street expectations. The main reason for the miss was that its costs are rising.

There are a number of stocks that are in the running to be the poster-child for the recent brutal sell-off in the stock market. In the landscape of bankruptcies and forced mergers is an entire market full of stocks trading from one extreme to another. One to note today is Cliffs Natural Resources (CLF).

Are the waters now safe for those buy and hold investors to deploy new capital? One very influential investor says yes, and yes in a big way. Today, the great Oracle of Omaha, Warren Buffett, is out with an article in the New York Times stating that the time to buy is when blood is in the streets.

Earlier last week Treasury announced that it would be taking $250 billion and buying preferred stock of banks around the country. Half of the money would be used to take positions in nine very large institutions with the rest being deployed across the banking spectrum.

It would be an understatement to say that the housing crunch has absolutely paralyzed this once proud institution -- Citigroup reported on Thursday its fourth straight quarterly loss.

September retail sales figures came out this week, and the numbers weren't pretty. It is now clear that the credit crisis is having a very real effect on the economy.

One of my favorite grocery stocks, Supervalu Inc. (SVU), has seen its stock drop by more than half as a result of expectations for lower profits.