Michael, I have been enjoying your posts. Thanks for sharing your thoughts. It is real hard to guess this market, but I think it is likely we will stay down through the end of the year. Tax selling should continue to be a factor since just about everything in the Nasdaq has been hammered this year. I am thinking the government is going to collect a lot less in taxes this year from capital gains. Come next year, there could be a fast and furious rally if the market anticipates a Greenspan rate cute in early January, or right during this cut. As for myself, I am hoping that AMAT gets hammered more in the short term relative to other techs, because I would like to sell others and move money to AMAT. One other thing we should maybe be looking at is the bullish/bearish survey in Investors Business Daily. I wonder if anyone has been monitoring this. I think most past bottoms corresponded to a very bearish sentiment.
One final note: Isn't amazing how wrong all the experts tend to be. For example, they all predicted a Y2K crash last year that never happened (instead we are having one this year for the real new millennium), then everyone was completely surprised by the big rally in the early part of the year. We heard all that talk about "new economy / old economy" back then, and the argument that techs were not affected by interest rates, which most pundits seemed to buy into. Then later we heard that the cyclical nature of the semiconductor industry was diminishing because of the adoption of chips in so many devices beyond PC's, and that the future for chip stocks still looked great, despite the runup. Also, at the top in March we heard about Nasdaq 6000 by year end. Then this summer we heard all about how tech stocks tend to languish in summer and therefore a fall rally was likely. Finally, in October we heard about the big gains techs usually have from Oct. 15th to March 15th, so great time to buy. I think what we need now is complete gloom and doom, then the market will make a bottom. Maybe one should just continually do the opposite of what the Wall Street experts advise.
Regards,
John |
