| Excellent points, Metal Trader. A number of factors that you do not mention greatly cloud the future: the Mid East fighting and increasingly higher risk of war there, the high debt (margin, credit cards, etc), high foreign investment in the US, overvalued dollar, high trade deficit, high money supply growth, and risk of not just slower growth but of recession. For this reason, it's very difficult to make a call on the longer term basis such as 2001 will be a good year for Healthcare, Telecoms, etc. For me, the only place to be right now is the Oil Patch (which includes gas) and cash. It's possible there's one more imminent play in the Naz and I'm also keeping an eye out for that. I wouldn't touch financials with a 10 foot pole even though interest rates will not be rising because of the high debt and threat of recession. Instead of having a theme for 2001, my take is that the investor needs to be very agile to take advantage of opportunities as they arise. As you pointed out gold stocks are significantly undervalued, and when (not if) the dollar breaks to the downside, the opportunity will be gold stocks. I'm not investing in gold stocks, however, until this occurs. |
