"Being too early is indistinguishable from being wrong." It's an old saying about the market You not only have to get the direction right, you have to get the timing at least approximately right. If you are always consistently bullish or bearish, you will be right about 80% (or 20%) of the time. The problem is you miss great gains or take great losses or waste serious amounts of time. I knoe this is obvious, but I get the feeling some people in this thread have been wrong for the last 7000 points.
Almost every time new economic statistics are released, they belie the bear position. Yeah, I know, Asia is going to h**l in a handbasket. They're a long way away, and a minor part of US prosperity. Japan's market started downhill in '89. You can see how much influence that has had on the US markets.
Yes, I know markets are psychological beasts and subject to both short-term and long-term emotion. Yet that seems to be a bullish argument. Joe Sixpack out there seems to have little tendency to cash in his mutual funds at the first whiff of trouble. Rather, he's getting famous for buying on the dips.
Yes, I know historically we've had a rather long run of rising markets, high P/Es, and prosperity. But statistics are not cause and effect. Statistics do not make things happen. In economics, they only tell you what has happened. It takes more than statistics and history to make a case.
Can anyone make the case that a serious collapse
(a) has already started?
(b) will start soon (in the next month)?
(c) will start in the next 6 months? |
