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From the following TSC article by Cramer:
This Market's No Fun, but It's Not a Horror Show Either
By James J. Cramer
9/15/99 8:52 PM ET
URL: thestreet.com
The market wants you to cry uncle. It wants you to say, "I can't take it anymore, I am giving up on my America Online" (AOL:NYSE). Or, "I'll be darned if I will continue to be tortured by this Exodus (EXDS:Nasdaq). To heck with the drug and health care stocks, get me some ..."
And there's the alternative. Get me some low-yielding cash? Get me some bonds that don't interest me? Get me some gold to lose money with? Get me some muni bonds that pay almost nothing? Get me some overinflated real estate?
There's not much out there to "get me." I have always found that cash doesn't burn the hole in our pockets that most mutual fund managers seem to think it does. Instead, I would, if I had my druthers, prefer not to focus on the endless backing and filling, and instead just accept the fact that we are in one of those periods where it is awfully hard to make money.
How do I define hard to make money? One way is to say you get your macro number and nobody cares. That's what happened today with the CPI.
Another is to say that, if the market went out looking great on one day, it might be simply awful the next. I went home tonight wishing I owned less Microsoft (MSFT:Nasdaq) and Sun Micro (SUNW:Nasdaq). Tomorrow I could wake up wishing I had a ton more. There is no consistency to this market whatsoever. That makes it very hard to game.
But it is not a horrible market. Recommendations still move stocks. There are still takeovers. There are plenty of buybacks. We are not deluged with terrible earnings. The bond market does not go down every day. We have seen those markets; we know what torture they can be.
What may be different, though, and what feels a bit like 1990 to me is the expectancy that something has to happen either up or down. My wager is that nothing big happens. The layer underneath the topsoil of this market might be quicksand, but a few feet under that is granite. That combination doesn't make for good footing, but it's no disaster either.
Why this is so frustrating, of course, is that the August-September-October downturns of the last few years have been followed by these beautiful upswings where everybody made a lot of dough. We all want the selloff to happen so we can get to the good stuff.
That's where I think we will be denied. I see this period lasting longer and discouraging more people than it has.
We haven't hit granite yet.
Random musings: Fakeouts abound during these periods. The CPI seemed to indicate that you could take the banks, and indeed they held up there for a while, but then disappointed. The drugs seemed to have traction, then they slipped. Oracle (ORCL:Nasdaq) led a lot of tech down but by the end of the day Oracle was bouncing and the rest of tech wasn't.
Very encouraged by our initial foray into the message board world. Didn't see a lot of "*$*$%^&%^# Extreme Networks" (EXTR:Nasdaq), or "go Copper Mountain (CMTN:Nasdaq) go!" Maybe we will share ideas at last in a no-shrill, no-frills setting, kind of like we would if you were at my office. |
