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Politics : Formerly About Applied Materials -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Roads End who wrote (44765)	3/30/2001 11:56:42 AM
From: mitch-c	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 70976

Why do people continue to say this? <The time to buy in at points of maximum pessimism and great uncertainty.> They say that because when they look backwards and see when the best buying point occurred, they remember their angst at the time. Dey coulda been a contenduh, if only ... Pessimism and uncertainty lower valuations. Since the market is an aggregation of psychology much more so than a perfectly efficient financial machine, it is prone to stampedes. The predictors we're parsing on this thread (bookings turn, analyst projections, earnings warnings, etc.) can never have a direct causal relationship with the stock price. They are all filtered by the question, "How will other investors interpret this?" When THAT question turns positive, so does the price - thus the validity of the "old wives' tale." I'm discovering that my training as a combat officer in the Army becomes more and more useful in a choppy market like this. When fighting a battle, you MUST be able to make timely decisions with incomplete, chaotic, and often conflicting information about the battlefield. Doing so requires the guts to risk a course of action BEFORE you can be certain it's a good one. One of my favorites among Murphy's Laws of Combat is: "Anything you do can get you killed - ESPECIALLY nothing." - Mitch