To: William Epstein who wrote (6133 ) 10/30/1998 1:03:00 PM From: manohar kanuri Read Replies (3) | Respond to
Strangely enough, it is only in the short term that I'm willing to give credence to the predictive power of charts. Primarily as mood indicators of traders and money managers. Longer term I'm pretty skeptical. Don't see any earthly reason why anyone's behaviour should remain constant over time especially in this information age when there isn't a chance in hell of forgetting history and repeating it. Collective memories now permeate a greater number of individual consciousnesses via universal education, and span a greater number of generations through the sheer power of repetition. A people who forget history are condemned to repeat it, but who's forgetting what? A handful of people owned 90% of Wall Street in 1929. That 90% has passed to millions of hands today. Much harder for millions to get into a collective funk than for a handful of clubby types to gather together and scare themselves silly. And, inter alia, take the world with them. The wonders of democratic free markets with widely dispersed share ownership means the power of the vote will always bias intervention towards protection on the downside. Unless that translates, via unfortunate concatenations, into a liquidity trap like in Japan, we're safe. And that experience, I daresay, will stand the rest of the western world in good stead for another generation or two. It's so much easier to divine the future a year or two hence. Don't need no favors putting domes on my house, if you get my drift. It's what I'm going to have for lunch tomorrow that always gets me. And we all know I'll eat a spoilt sandwich come some tomorrow and then that future won't be quite so divine, will it? Macbeth got it right - "tomorrow" is your ultimate bracket creep. Any coincidence he was so into divination? Time to stop rambling.
