Malcolm,
There's a reality out there; I'm struggling to present it.
There is a reality only to the extent that you see it, the way you see it. Not everybody sees it that way. An entire herd can and does move in one direction simply because the mechanisms of the market are such that an individual decision has no significance apart from its role in determining the collective move. Foot-draggers and skeptics raise the level of friction and slow down the moves but in the aggregate we cannot know that all foot-draggers were tardy for the same reason. And on the flip side, all those in sync with the herd are not all in sync for the same reason either.
There are fundamentalists galore who own Softbank. Can you justify owning Softbank on an earnings basis? Can you give me a fundamentals case that does not involve using precisely the same tools as TA: averages, standard deviations, guesswork and heuristics projecting the past into the future beyond the right edge? Are the unrealized gains of a Softbank qualitatively similar to the unrealized gains of a Berkshire Hathaway? The mere name of Berkshire has a magic that can be summoned up, the pixie dust rubbing off onto whatever and whoever is sharing that magical moment. The particular fictions we choose to believe or act upon are not important - as long as the balance isn't too far tilted in one direction there is enough play for everyone. For some the Softbank crutch is Berkshire Hathaway, for others it's tea leaves or TA or faith and prayer. The glue that holds your reality together is only of marginal value. No matter which way you go, as Borges says (paraphrased): we have dreamt the world, dreamt it as firm, ubiquitous in space and durable in time, but in its architecture we have allowed eternal crevices of unreason that tell us it must be false.
And more pertinently, Katherine Derbyshire over on the semi-equip thread is fond of saying: It's better to be rich than right. |
