i don't want to shock you but analyst are paid to be bullish. do you think financial firms hire analyst to give you good advice for free or do they give you the best financial advice for the firms benefit? if you think a healthy bull market is the fed pumping $85,000,000,000 a month in it at all time highs well your in the perfect market. you talk to me like i wake up yesterday and this my 2nd day on earth. i am giving my opinion, its not advice, and i paid my tuition to learn it. you see my screen name i don't change it ever. did i even say crash? i don't know what tomorrow will bring but i know what a real sell off looks like and you saw it the past 2 days.
What a bunch of garbage. The S&P is about 5% higher now than it was in March 2000. That was over 13 freakin' years ago! Recent years of ZIRP, QE, etc. have done nothing but keep the stock market flat...and make it impossible to earn a decent return in low-risk investments.
"actually" is correct. the press release will say he has decided to move on to.... the new chairman will be a bigger advocate of monetary inflation even more akin to a central banker from a banana republic who gets its directives from a president, rather than being independent.
That stat is useless because it assumes investors plunked all their money into their funds at the top of the market. More realistic would be start in 1980 or 1990 ( for example ) and assume the same monthly investment in the market every year for many years. QE allowed US markets to recover from one of the biggest financial disasters in our lifetime. The real part is huge corporate profits. I don't care exactly how this occurred, I just understand that it did and must react accordingly. I don't believe in buy and hold when there is massive short term uncertainty in either direction.
1980 or 1990 would be just as arbitrary as 2000. In either case, you're starting in the best decades that the stock market has ever seen. So that just fits your own bias. As for your QE statement, what kind of recovery has it allowed? The mere thought that QE may be tapered off is causing a panic in bonds, stocks and all other asset classes. Just think what will happen when it really is tapered off. What miracle solution will start the next recovery after that?
I offered up multiple years, you picked 2000 by design. Doesn't really matter, I have no bias. I will say though I was buying index funds in 2009, and not buying them in 2000. That was my choice as a discretionary investor. I don't see panic. Maybe its because I'm in Canada; saw a poll today and two thirds of responses said they weren't concerned at all by this weeks market action. Doesn't sound like any panic to me. I'm more optimistic about the future then you are. Maybe this is fundamentally true though, that things truly are worse for everyday Americans then Canadians can see. I can't relate to it I'm not living it. So investing in Canadian markets now would hedge me against not understanding US markets fully. I will note though that a lot of Canadian economists are pretty optimistic about the US economy, which I have to take into account. Should I believe traders on here that seem cynical all the time, most of whom badly called recent markets ?
Actually in constant dollars it's not flat but down quite a bit, your losing a little less than you would have if you'd just buried your money in a tin can in your backyard. But those who were able to keep their jobs on Wall Street are doing just fine! On Wall Street the only thing that matters is nominal values and public perception. In real life the only thing that matters is value in constant dollars.