Please also stop back to update things.
I will leave you with a question...
If the stock market is so fantastic, why are Central Banks stepping in to purchase futures and other derivative contracts to prop it up every time it begins to fail and looks dicey? Why is that necessary?
I have no idea whether stocks are going up or down in the near future. Nor do I particularly care because, in keeping with my earlier point, I own more than stocks. But I will note that stocks have been the best performing asset class over the last roughly 200 years. They have outperformed all other broad asset classes over every decade since 1900 excepting only the 1930’s which was deflationary, the 1970’s which was inflationary and the 2000’s which was skewed by the end of the decade financial panic. Stock market declines and even crashes are a bit like the flue. They come around with an unpleasant degree of regularity and you just roll with, assuming you are adequately diversified.
Again it sounds like you are confusing asset classes with indexing. Your argument against stocks may, or may not hold water in the neat term. But it does not make an argument for long term active portfolio management.
Interesting, we were just talking about that on a related thread, but the thing is that the fed does not buy common stock (much less derivatives/futures) so they can't move share prices. Loony leftists like to say the government's all powerful but in real life the Fed's small potatoes. Right now Fed banks got about $4T --mostly T-bills plus a few mortgages. Total corporate assets (from page 124 of the Flow of Funds) for non-financial businesses is $37T. The Fed --or any governmental agency for that matter-- couldn't control the free market even if it wanted to. Central planning is a lie --one that works great only for pundits and politicians.