To: Voltaire who wrote (11029 ) 4/4/2000 11:41:00 PM From: stockman_scott Respond to of 35685
V: How's the view from the porch tonight?... I was in meetings in Indianapolis today and missed all the wild activity in the market....Haven't sold a thing recently....It's a blessing I have a LONG time horizon for my investments...When do you think the Naz will start a sustained recovery? Inquiring minds want to know <G>... Regards, Scott --------------------------------------------------------- BTW, Here is an interesting article I just discovered... <<Tuesday April 4, 5:42 pm Eastern Time Forbes.com Market's Psyche Stirs Volatility By Marius Meland The market's nerve-wrecking volatility reflects a deep struggle between the two primal emotional forces in the investor's psyche that drive the market: greed and fear. So says a prominent market psychiatrist who thinks the market's peaks and dips mirror the emotional swings of investors who are beginning to seriously question stock prices after the longest bull market in history. At one point today, the tech-laced Nasdaq Composite Index dropped a stunning 13% before it staged a recovery and ended the day down some 1.8%. (On Oct. 19, 1987, the Nasdaq shed 11.35%.) Yesterday, the index dropped 7.6% amid the worst decline since August 1998. In the blue-chip market, meanwhile, the Dow Jones Industrial Average lost 4% today before it also reversed intraday losses to cap the day with a loss of 0.4%. ``We're seeing panic creep in, and if the market continues to fall on Wednesday it could become widespread. The market is dominated by the two sentiments of greed and fear, and the combination of fear and a herd mentality is potentially explosive,' says John Schott, a psychiatrist who teaches a course at Harvard about market psychology and comanages client portfolios for Steinberg Global Asset Management. Schott, who also publishes a newsletter on market psychology, thinks the direct cause of the market's roller-coaster ride this week--the outcome of the Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT - news) antitrust trial--is merely an excuse for a broad selloff. The deeper underlying cause is crumbling market confidence because of the high valuations in the tech sector. ``Because greed has had the upper hand, many investors--even institutional ones--have been in denial over the troublesome rise in valuations. Greed works like a kind of buffer, so it will take several severe blows to ignite fears in investors,' says Schott. Over the past few weeks, there have been plenty of such blows, including the restatement of Microstrategy's (Nasdaq: MSTR - news) earnings, the partial retreat from equities by influential Goldman, Sachs strategist Abby Cohen, and the collapse of settlement talks between the government and Microsoft. In fact, Schott thinks stocks are already well on their way into a bear market. Even though indexes are up on the year, the negative breadth and the peaks of many industry indexes, such as the Dow Jones Industrial Transports, tells a different story. Now many people are beginning to question whether the bull market is finally over, and that's beginning to wear on the overall market confidence. Schott says most investors tend to overestimate their tolerance for pain in the form of losses. Investors typically overestimate their tolerance by a factor of two, so that an investor who thinks he can handle a 30% loss actually begins to panic when the market tumbles 15%. ``Up until now, this bull market has been a sucker's game. There are a lot of people who have gained a lot of self-esteem from their performance in the market. We've all met people who brag about their portfolio gains at cocktail parties. Now that the market is plunging, it also takes the bottom out of these people's self-confidence, and they are beginning to panic,' says Schott. In contrast, he says, people who stay calm during a panic are of an altogether different caliber. They tend to be people with a high level of self-confidence who don't derive their self-esteem from the market, and who have a clear-cut system of investing that they stick to consistently. These are the people who typically manage to step on the brakes in a panic by starting to buy when everybody else is selling, says Schott. ``Many of these investors are value-oriented, and they actually help stabilize the market. When stock prices go up too much, they'll start shorting. When the market drops to attractive levels, they step in to buy,' he says. Go to www.forbes.com to see all of our latest stories.>>