including the statements on your chart and your response to freak in the next post,do you think there is a chance their is a bigger plan at the end ,simply for the fact the present course isn't working, do they have a backup plan,one question i have is how powerful are ms,jpm,the banks,is there a higher power ,are gs,jpm ,ecb,and bernanke on strings i've never seen the market so transparently manipulated,when they got rid of bs and lehman ,they eliminated the houses preying on each other and they all became one team,the fed was always in the background, they are now the biggest traders in the game, the whale, to be in such lockstep there has to be a higher power
Irrational exuberance never go away do they? Thanks to Ben and ECB. Certainly a case of "crisis fatigue". The bulls never stop charging before the cliff and will never realize their mistakes until being airborne. History is full of it and why wouldn't it be any difference this time or any other time? Thanks to the so called modern time "crises" white collar serfdom is here to stay. As the new masters would say, " Your problems our gains" "So we need more but not less".
Well it's also a matter of embedded structural incentives. If you are a Wall Street money manager, then your greatest risk is "career risk" as Jeremy Grantham has pointed out, i.e. the risk of getting fired. Money managers -- especially the long only kind -- get fired for lagging their benchmarks. If your peers outperform you, it's the pink slip. If you and your peers all lose money at the same time, however, then everything is fine, b/c Wall St managers are judged on "relative" performance. It's somehow ok to lose 25% of your capital -- a "good performance" even -- if the S&P loses 26%. This incentive profile strongly encourages "beta chasing" -- buying aggressively for fear of missing out, even when such buying is incredibly risky -- and further encourages holding through severe drawdowns, for fear that the market will rally after the money manager has sold, until finally the investment client pulls his capital out and thus realizes the awful loss. In short, career risk incentives create the worst environment possible from a risk management perspective - frenzied beta chasing plus utter disregard for downside risk - because Wall Street performance measures are based on the wrong things. (Which in turn is related to the gullibility of the public, but that's a whole other kettle of fish.)
Isn't this the essence of "herding" or "group think"? Or market taking the path of least resistance until being forced to re-route by external factors (i.e. events deemed large to ignore) It's nature at its finest I guess. Soros made his billions simply by observing subtle sentiment shift (reflexivity) and also by anticipating/betting on which companies will be future market darlings. He took a couple years just to identify one single two billion pay day off the British pound. Something the "typical" money manger can never really quite grasp as it goes beyond economic more into behavior speculation of the most likely future moves (both rational and irrational) probably with some elements of game theory. BTW, Soros studied philosophy in college I believe. Market is currently in positive returns chasing mode but the move have been going into defensive stocks Walmart, Costco & strong established sectors away from speculative/high growth issues. So IMO the big players are positioning themselves for future weakness. The recent run up could just be money flow from high risk to low risk and to the simple minded have the appearance of a out of control bull.
Than there's nothing "new" under the sun is it? Same pools from a 100 year ago is being replaced by hedge funds, banks, and algos. So much for this time it's difference.