<<<The market is not about right and wrong; it is about up and down.>>>
I could not disagree more. For one to succeed in the market or in life, one has to be guided by a coherent philosophy. It is difficult enough to arrive at a philosophy to live by, but to have a different philosophy for every occasion is no recipe.
It is no secret that there is no secret to timing market highs and lows. You are absolutely correct to assert that the market goes up as well as it goes down and that you can make money going either way. But, that is much too much like gambling. You can win betting on red or you can win betting on black. Right or wrong has nothing to do with how the bet turns out. What is the difference between that and what you are advocating?
Investing however, is something totally different. The market is a real time totalizator. The market discounts everything including what is knowable, or what we think we know, about the future. You can choose your investment. You can choose to invest in things you believe in. The time horizon does not have to be twenty minutes. Or, you can choose to invest in currency fluctuations, but unless you have dinner with central bankers and you can pick up on body language and or a slip of the tongue, you are gambling. George Soros, as an example, does not gamble.
Here you are, after putting yourself in the middle of perhaps the greatest economic boom (making Japan in the sixties look like small potatoes) in the history of mankind, you are hedging this and hedging that. I just hope your grandchildren do not look back and ask about you as my offspring asked about his uncle's investment in Polaroid over a half century ago. He was an early believer in the product but did not buy any of the shares, he bought the camera instead.
Mary |
