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Strategies & Market Trends : The Epic American Credit and Bond Bubble Laboratory

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To: orkrious who wrote (70488)9/28/2006 9:24:29 AM
From: Wyätt Gwyön  Read Replies (4) of 110194
 
one of the reasons i stopped subscribing to Fleck is that he writes anecdotal bearish crap all the time. every week he posts some gloom and doom story, so it can always look like he's predicting the end. in my opinion anecdotes are a dime a dozen. they are interesting to shake your head at but what do they really tell you. they aren't statistically meaningful.

so he knows a couple oldtimers who remember the pain of 1973; what does that mean? it doesn't mean anything. it is just another random anecdote. if somebody looked at all his random anecdotes from over the years, i would guess their correlation with the events he is "predicting" ex ante is no better than chance.

to give you a different anecdote, Arnold Van Den Berg, whose performance at Century Management since the early 1970s has probably blown Fleck out of the water, is EXTREMELY bullish on US large caps. and that is a guy who has lived through some bear markets. for reference see the latest issue of Outstanding Investor Digest (the only investment publication i know of recommended by Warren Buffet).

i wonder if Fleck's short fund has even made money at all over the past ten years. if he is so smart why doesn't he publish his fund's historical results on his website?

somebody who bought an SPX index fund in 1996, when Fleck started writing his bearish stuff, and subsequently went to sleep for a decade, has doubled his money. what has Fleck done? did his short fund double investors' money after fees over that period?

does all this mean the market can't tank? of course not. i just don't think whatever Fleck says about it carries much weight. i think the opinions of people like Van Den Berg, who have the results and show them, carry much more weight.

here's an example of a bear fund and what it's done over the last decade. BEARX turned an investor's $9 into $6; worse than a mattress!
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