Exactly right. And if the market is manipulated it just presents opportunity after the manipulation is done. What happens to the market when stops have been run?
Think about it, every stock eventually goes belly up. Look at the big picture and I think it is reasonable to conclude that it is ultimately a scam on the average investor. That doesn't mean you can't make money trading it. I don't think anyone was claiming that.
The market is a scam, how? Nobody told you to buy the bottom or sell the top. Nobody told you to double down on the way down. Nobody told you to buy on analyst recommendations. Nobody told you to hold positions overnight. Nobody told you to trade with 5k. etc etc etc There is so many reasons to say that I lose money because the stock market is a scam. But there are still people who are getting rich everyday from the market. Is the market not a scam for them?
Your point I think is that stocks that are going to implode take considerably longer than they should, and we as investors could potentially step on a land mine. Yep, could happen and that is a good point. But let me point out that this works both ways. If stock prices of good companies are efficient (as in the efficient market hypotheses) and reacted to news that should cause their price to instantaneously reflect that news, and there are no overreactions so that the news is always perfectly priced in, investing would certainly be a causeless pursuit, as there would be no possible edge in investing, except for possibly an upward drift that made the market as a whole go up over long periods of time. In this case, we would hand over all equity investing to computers as there would be nothing left to do and equity returns would look like bond returns over long periods. Where I am going with this is, while there are land mines in equity investing out there in the form of BSC, ENE etc, for every BSC there are 10 GEs, or 10 WAGs, or 10 CATs etc. In other words, be very glad that we there are land mines out there in equities. That is why we get a 7% return on average over very long periods. Basically the way the game is structured is, if you want riskless returns, buy US treasury bonds. If you want returns above that, you must take risk, even risk of ruin. In every broker statement that I have ever seen, that is made explicit in very clear writing. nitro
Nitro, Two statemnets. That is why we get a 7% return on average over very long periods. risk of ruin The rate of return is 7%, I opine that the risk of ruin is greater now for this same % of return than years ago. I get the impression this is true across all asset classes, business, real estate. In fact the risk of ruin may be disproportionate to what it was in business and real estate vs expected rate of return of the past. Anyone else get this impression?
That probably happened because you spent all your money on stock and didn't have enough left over to buy a ruler. The stock market is not a Ronco Showtime Rotisserie.