Look at this monthly chart of the SPX over several years. count the number of up months before 2008 and after 2008. It is relentless mind-numbing buying fueled by funny money that eventually runs into a brick wall. All in the name of the 401K. What is worse, most of the gains are when our markets aren't even open, which means mutual funds are buying the high. They do this month after month, year after year, decade after decade. What a bunch of cretins.
I do not believe its funny money per se or mutual funds buying and pumping at relentlessly stupid amounts and stupid high prices its everyone.. Its all driven by human emotion for example real estate -> people buy at high prices because they "assume" prices will continue in the same path without revaluing which will cause them to become inflated at such a rate the normal person will not be able to buy a home or property in the future... so they absorb the risk now instead of waiting for the proper value. L.A is an example of this the econ professor from yale uses the example "its a height of fashion and when prices rocketed up they did a survey to find out why they were buying and 80% said they were buying because they were scared they could not buy in the future and didnt want to miss out"... Its stupid human nature that forces these buying sprees... when the bust occured the mortgage for the property mixed with property costs made it impossible to profit off commercial leases or residential renting now im no rocket scientist but if revenues-expenses= not a profit its probably not a good investment... yet it was bought at obscene levels. stupid people w/ stupid amount of money combined w/ stupid amount of leverage buying stupid investments = ....... also mutual funds dont quite operate like that.. when I visted american fund .. the tools and philosophy they used is quite interesting.. you can be assured that mutual funds do not spend money in stupid ways.. they all have a purpose and that purpose may not be inline with yours... but they are quite efficient.. and even during the "lost decade" that mutual fund used basic rebalancing procedures and dynamic sector rotation to position them best for future growth.. its easy to say they buy non sense because most people dont dig into how they work why they work the way they do .. lack of knowledge -> always breeds worry ->which causes us to question in debacles like we had.
wow u sound like my twin... how old r u ... and where you born on a naval base? because we may have been seperated at birth
Some would say, unfortunately, if you want to understand this stuff you have to read: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=806664 There are popular books that try to say the same thing, but it is better to get it from the horses mouth.
If you read the above paper, it must be balanced with: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=305008 "...For example, Kandel and Stambaugh (1996) argue that even a low level of statistical predictability can generate economic signicance and abnormal returns may be attained even if the market is successfully timed only 1 out of 100 times..." :eek: :eek:
didnt bother reading all the pages of this thread, so I'm not sure this has been mentioned but... The price of a stock at any given time is supposed to reflect the intrinsic value of the stock (which is largely based on analysts estimates). When a company exceeds analysts expectations, it means the stock was underpriced by the market. So the market corrects for this by increasing the price of the stock. Asking how this benefits the investor is pointless. The stock price is bid up from the current level, to the new equilibrium level by investors. There are many more investors who believe the stock is underpriced than overpriced when a stock beats analyst expectations. The stock price rises until there are an equal amount who believe the stock is over/underpriced (resulting in a new equilibrium price).
PG raises dividend 9.5% to .48. This marks the 54th straight year it has raised it's dividend. http://www.reuters.com/article/idAFN1922054320100419?rpc=44 What a stud.
Companies are increasing their dividend in droves. And yet, they are not hiring. Is hiring and dividends on two sides of the same coin?
I was listening to the BSC hearings yesterday. An intersting question was raised regarding capital requirements at the bank. I wish I had the transcript, but the answer deviated a little bit to how BSC investors were pressuring BSC to put the cash on hand to use, either to use more leverage, or to return it to the investors in the form of a dividend or stock buyback. The CEO said they flatly refused to do so, since financial institutions need a certain discipline when it comes to keeping cash on hand. I sort of agreed with him, but this raises an interesting point: the lower the dividend of a financial company, the more leveraged they may be and perhaps the greater at risk they are to even minor runs on their bank. Food for thought anyway.
I want to switch gears for a post. In general, when a small amount of a volatile asset is added to a portfolio, and rebalanced regularly, its actual return is usually considerably higher than the stand alone return. This is because the interaction of asset volatility and policy rebalancing produces a natural "buy low/sell high" bias into the rebalancing transactions. In addition, rebalancing benefits most with risky assets with similar returns. In previous work we have shown that this "rebalancing bonus" is approximated by (1-r) x Var/2 where r is the correlation of the asset with the rest of the portfolio, and Var is its variance. Precious metals equity is a good case in point. The variance of a diversified portfolio metals equity is in the 0.1 range, and its correlation with most diversified portfolios is zero. Thus, an approximately 5% ((1 - 0) x 0.1 x 1/2) excess return on the asset is earned simply by rebalancing it regularly!!! :eek: http://www.efficientfrontier.com/ef/497.pdf What if transactions costs are [near] zero, bid ask spreads are very tight. What then does this statement above about rebalancing frequency become in the limit as t->0 of continuous rebalancing? This may be much of what high frequency strategies do (you need probably one more insight). This idea, coupled with my NFV and extremely negligible commissions, I think I can trade HF as well.