Shareswatch Australia

On budget night Wayne Swan could have saved us all a lot of time by simply standing up and saying that his plan for the Australian economy was to simply sit back and hope the mining boom continued. As I have said for over a year now, Australian policy makers have set the economy up for a severe downturn if commodities prices slump and there is no Plan B.

Both the ASX All Ordinaries and S&P/ASX 200 have been basically moving sideways now since September and although the market may seem to be drifting, it is actually reflecting fairly accurately the state of the Australian economy. For despite what some finance journalists seem to believe, the Australian economy will not be able to surge ahead simply because the Chinese are stimulating their domestic economy.

Established back in 1996, Melbourne IT (ASX:MLB) has grown from a company focused on registering Australian domain names to being listed on the ASX in 1999 and is now a provider of a range of web based services. From 2003 the company expanded rapidly via a number of strategic acquisitions and now must not only deal with the  global economic downturn, but also face intense competition in a number of it’s key product areas.

In bear markets we often hear a lot about so called defensive stocks, but what exactly are defensive stocks and are the traditional defensive stocks still a good option in this particular bear market?