1993 yield 2.7, 2012 2.1 1993 earnings 26.90, 2012 99.00 1993 p/e 17.3, 2012 14.4 housing? Europe? China? I can give you about 400 reasons it could go bad, and thankfully, most of them are campaigning instead of screwing my investment account up industrial production up .3 % NAHB/Wells Fargo best since 2006 building permits up PCE? What was it in 2012? 1.4%, CPI 1.7% 1,840,000 expansion of payrolls 2012
Happy to see some optimism. 1,840,000 expansion of payrolls in 2012 is nothing really to pop the bubbly over when you do the math on the entire size of the population. Maybe i'm a little to myopic or bearish but I don't really see any reason why the market valulations should be where they are today. As i said i am not a perma bear. I am very open to discussing opinions pertaining to this topic. Rather than being to optimistic or pessimistic, I am agnostic. The global economy are in sticky situations no doubt. I don't see europe being able to fix things for the next 10-20 years. the relationship between The US/China and the Brics is a really interesting paradigm. There is a massive currency bubble in china and not to mention that they are a long long longgg way away from becomming major consumers on the global economy when you factor in the average gdp per capita. The deleveraging cycle that we are going through right now is not a doom or gloom sitauation rather it is a shift. Part of that shift though, leaves a shit town of americans unemployed going into the future. The economic landscape going forward is going to be interesting to say the very least
these are the fundamentals we having been living with. They're not that good, but they aren't getting any worse. Not enough to convince me it is time to sell. China already consumes more than they export you're not a bear, I'm certainly not a bull give me a good reason and I'll gladly go back to cash so far, nobody has given me that good reason I don't trade stocks, I invest in them on cash, with a long time horizon, so my outlook may be quite a bit different than the ES trader It's prudent for all of us to be watchful way up in here. I don't believe in buy and hold, but if I sold everytime somebody needed a negative headline, I would probably always be flat. A .03% improvement in some fundamental doesn't make much news. But here we are 100% later, climbing on one .03% after another.
To be honest, I agree with your thesis. I started off investing as a value investor and got my ass handed to me back in 2008. With all the uncertainty in the market and world, for me it makes more sense to be sitting on more cash at any point in time in attempts to catch a black swan event. You sound like you have a pretty decent grip on things though. I was you all the best in your investing/trading this month
the only thing I trade is forex, and about half the time I feel like I have lost my mind and gone crazy. I take a lot of risks over there, and am always out on margin. If anybody can devote full time to it, I would highly recommend keeping a trading account on the side. It started out as a hobby, but now I make enough from forex to pay the bills, so that takes some pressure off the conservative account. As a matter of fact, it makes me much more bold, much more patient. I suppose it would be the same for a young man with a real job and excess income to invest each month. I wouldn't know, I've never actually been one of them. When I had a real job, every penny that didn't get spent on monthly bills went to building up a trading account to replace the one I blew up. My investing was never really that sophistcated. When I retired from trading I just put 50% in stocks and 50% in bonds and turned the computer off and never followed it again. I didn't even know I had suffered a crash in 2008, somehow, those bond dividends covered the monthly bills. But I'm one of the few people whose monthly expenses have gone down each year. You know, wives leave, kids get out on their own, no need for a big house anymore, etc.
New all time highs. Contrarians predicted a trend reversal while trend traders took the other side......
Here is how I see it: I cannot find any real solution being put on in any country with debt problems (US,UK,Japan,EU). Maybe the only useful thing I saw to solve the debt problem is stealing money from current accounts in Cyprus,but that's not enough,Cyprus is too small,and there are other consequences (bank runs,people hiding money,etc). Now everyone ends up pumping money in the system,I don't believe this is a solution.That's why I believe something bad must happen,I also believe in a system like this it's nearly impossible to know WHEN. So I sit on the short side waiting,trying to control damages.
Isn't PA so important because you can't know when. Naratives, even when they are correct, are frequently very costly propositions. BTW, I accept you premise that it will all blow up -- SOMEDAY!!
Well,there are also technical signs: low volatility,prices following a straight line,low volumes.But none tells when.If it starts to fall,you cannot tell for sure:it can look like a correction.I don't believe there are methods which can tell when a move has begun (I believe there are individuals who can)