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To: Lazarus_Long who wrote (13943)	1/20/2005 5:43:12 PM
From: Lizzie Tudor	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 17683

you are childish, always trying to take issues that I discuss in general terms and personalize them. How old are you anyway? In general I prefer living in a rich country vs. a bankrupt one. Call me crazy. I don't like having to pay double to travel to Europe than a few short years ago. No reason for this fiscal mess we are in, it is a government spending problem. I'm certain the markets would be much, much better if we weren't in the middle of a government spend-o-rama. If we had half billion dollar deficits in the 90s, I would have had the same complaints. But we did not.

To: Lazarus_Long who wrote (13943)	1/21/2005 11:03:37 AM
From: Original Mad Dog	Respond to of 17683

Are we in a bear or bull market? I don't know that I'd call it either one, but if I had to choose I wouldn't call it a bear market. The S&P 500, the broadest base index of major companies that is not heavily weighted toward any particular sector, closed out 2004 at 1211. That was higher than its level: One month earlier (1173) Six months earlier (1140) One year earlier (1111) Two years earlier (879) Three years earlier (1148) The 1211 level was approximately the same as six years earlier (Dec. 98), when the index closed at 1229, having just gone above 1211 for the first time ever that December. The Dec. 04 level is roughly double the level of the S&P 500 from nine years earlier, in Dec. 95 (615). It is nearly triple the level of 12 years ago, Dec. 92 (435). So we have a broad based market index that has tripled in 12 years, doubled in 9 years, is higher than it was one month, six months, one year, two years, and three years ago. I'm just not sure the word "bear" really fits the broad-based market. Tech stocks as represented by the Nasdaq index would seem to be a different matter, though of course they are a subsector of the market as a whole. Yet the statements above are true even when applied to the Nasdaq index. The Nasdaq closed out 2004 at a level (2175) higher than: One month earlier (2096) Six months earlier (2047) One year earlier (2003) Two years earlier (1335) Three years earlier (1950) If you go back nine years, the Nasdaq has slightly more than doubled (1052 in Dec. 1995 to 2175 in Dec. 2004). If you go back 12 years the Nasdaq has slightly more than tripled (676 to 2175). So even in the tech sector, long term investors have done alright over the past dozen years, slightly more than tripling their money in the Nasdaq and slightly less than tripling it in the S&P 500, while investors who judge the market in a more short term perspective will see that they have gained at least some over the past one, two and three year periods. (Traders, of course, might not have done as well depending on what stocks they picked.) Really the only investors who could view this as a bear market, IMO, are those who use as their primary (or only) points of reference the equity prices of the late 1990's. Those prices were far higher, compared to the profitability and revenue metrics of the companies involved, than equity prices throughout the history of the U.S. markets. Most statisticians would look at those late 1990's data points as aberrational and instead focus on the data points in the many years before and the several years since, all of which show steady though unspectacular gains. Tripling your money over a dozen years, historically, is not bad. Yahoo Finance's figures on the S&P 500 go back to 1982. The Index closed 1982 at 140. It had not tripled until 1992, ten years later. And now, by the end of 2004, 12 years after that, it has tripled again. The 1980's, when that first tripling occurred, were viewed as a bull market (interrupted a couple of times by the brief 1987 crash and the 1990-91 recession). Yet the 12-year period from 1992 to 2004 also saw equity prices triple in a roughly comparable number of years. Viewed in perspective, I think that still qualifies as a bull market by my definition.