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Strategies & Market Trends : Gorilla and King Portfolio Candidates -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: lurqer who wrote (40105)	3/8/2001 9:34:21 PM
From: Mike Buckley	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 54805

lurqer, Great post! Aside from the fact that nothing is off-topic in this folder except rudeness, I believe your ideas are especially on-topic. I'm happy to discuss them with you so long as it doesn't take too much time. However, I'll know the discussion is especially worthwhile if many others join us. Since you mentioned the '29 debacle and the lengthy time it took for the economy and stocks to recover, I should also mention that I don't think any current-day comparisons with that period are viable. Similarly, I don't think comparisons with Japan's hapless stock market have any merit. In both examples, things are very different from 1929 and very different from Japan's economic boom-and-bust-based infrastructure. I don't pretend to be an expert on either, but I'll stick with my comparatively superficial understanding of the differences until someone proves to me that the comparisons really do have merit. There is little doubt in my mind though, that you could greatly enhance my understanding of these longer term cycles and how to best to prepare for them. You over-estimate my knowledge. My beliefs are based more on convictions about the role technology -- U. S. technologies well entrenched in gorilla-like strength in particular -- will play in the world's economy over the very long haul. Regarding cycles, one of your comments makes me think you've read one or both of Harry Dent's books. Right? He knows reams more about cycles than I ever hope to know. --Mike Buckley

To: lurqer who wrote (40105)	3/9/2001 12:00:37 AM
From: Thomas Mercer-Hursh	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 54805

Current demographics imply one may begin later this decade. Huh? Given that nothing about the current population profile of the US corresponds to any pattern in the past, what in the world do you mean by this. Seems to me that one of the most common and recurrent fallacies in thinking about the market is to mine out some pattern and then apply it to predicting the future, typically as if it was somehow a major truth. Well, guess what? The really recurrent patterns are pretty trivial and the rest of the forces operate on an environment which is never quite the same twice. How could one expect that the "rules" which might have supposedly applied 70 years ago would apply in the same way today with the massively changed character of both the companies which made up the market and the economy in which they were embedded?

To: lurqer who wrote (40105)	3/9/2001 1:01:54 PM
From: ratan lal	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 54805

Just as I would behave differently if a black bear or grizzly wandered into my campsite, so I believe the same behavior for bear corrections and secular bears is inappropriate. What generally happens to an average (me !) investor is that he/she freezes when a bull approaches. Then when the bull (market) is gone and before the bear approaches, the average investor charges, assuming he is going after the bull. Now when he faces a bear, he retreats. But the ltb&h doesnt have to make any decisions, whether approached by the bull or bear, and is perfect for the average investor. Of course the expert investor, if he can recognize the cycles, can in fact improve the returns greatly. However if he is wrong on the cycles, can lose his proverbial a@#. And as Buckley says, over a very long time, we are always in a bull market.

To: lurqer who wrote (40105)	3/10/2001 2:47:48 AM
From: Jacob Snyder	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 54805

re: Current demographics imply one (secular bear) may begin later this decade I lived for 6 years in a rural Alaska village of 4000 people. It was as isolated as anywhere on the planet. We got our first paved road, out first ATM machine, and internet access, while I was living there. But, the jobs were filled, and the goods consumed, by people from all over the planet. One of the doctors working there was a former Boat Person, born in Vietnam. When there was a nursing shortage, we recruited from Australia and Scotland. The locals weren't meeting the demand for restaurants, so we had a migration of Koreans, who set up several restaurants. And so on. My point is, that our labor pool was the whole planet. The Global Village is real. Movements of labor, capital, and goods, are so fluid now, that it is pointless to make predictions based on the demographics of a country in isolation, because there is no such thing (isolation, that is). All of the Gorillas are, or are rapidly becoming, global corporations. If Japan is becoming a nation of pensioners, then the nimble Gorilla simply shifts sales, production, and R&D, to whatever nations have large cohorts at prime producing-and-consuming ages. And, in the U.S., any unfilled job niche, from software engineers to fruit-pickers, gets filled by legal or illegal immigration. I haven't read Dent's books, because, after hearing the initial premise, it didn't seem plausible, from what I've seen in my own life. If he found patterns in the past, and if those patterns show causation (rather than just correlation), I still don't think it tells us anything about the future. It is different now.