Down .75% is the woodshed? LOL. Time for you to go back to the yahoo message boards: http://finance.yahoo.com/mb/spy/
Traders who are currently long this market, after this years huge run up on QE2, are facing a high risk area with the uncertainty of the government shut down. Maverick are you net long this market at these levels? Jeffrey Skeldon Lewisville (Dallas/Fort Worth), Texas.
No, I'm not net long. My portfolio is always neutral. All those questions you posed were the same questions we had 6 months ago, 12 months ago and 18 months ago. The market is always faced with uncertainty. That's what pushes it higher.
Years ago, long before constant Fed intervention, 20% downswings were considered mere "noise". I remember Joe Granville once saying, "you can't time 5% corrections"... Shoot, we can hardly ever GET 5% corrections these days.
Alright, let me offer you a different perspective. Many years ago markets were much more concentrated and there was far less choice on where and how to allocate your money. Hell ETF's didn't exist. Today, markets are very diverse. There are 1000's of ETF's and hedging vehicles available. Even ten years ago mom and pop types had no real effective way to hedge outside of the complexity of options. Today they can buy a short ETF just as easy as buying shares of Disney. The market today is over hedged! Options volumes are shattering records while share volumes are making new lows. There are so many ways to hedge and lay off risk and the corresponding effect of that is less overall volatility. Of course these hedges come at a cost. It lowers the returns across the board. So while you may see the broad market up 15% on the year, the avg long investor might only have captured a third of that. The bottom line is the old days if you got scared, you got out. Today no one ever needs to sell, you can simply buy long etf's that offset risk. There are huge tax benefits to doing this if you think about it.
Not disputing.... just making a comment about "market taken to the woodshed" on a 1% correction. What today is labeled "bear market" used to be just noise. All of these Fed and government interventions in the markets are to prevent revealing, "the emperor wears no clothes".
Thanks for your response Maverick74, your response makes a lot of sense. The market and hedging is interesting, explains the relatively small pull backs that have been experienced in recent years. The market keeps on climbing, despite uncertainty and negative economic conditions! Jeffrey Skeldon Lewisville (Dallas/Fort Worth), Texas.