bump
When your currency is debasing, stocks will be expressed in terms of ‘more dollars’.
Money taken out of the market will go where, real estate? Commodities? Mattresses?
“The U.S. isn’t expected to grow at anything close to breakneck speed next year.”
How can you do that if your population is at minimum or slightly below replacement levels in its fertility rate?
We don’t manufacture our citizenry like we used to and we sent most of our manufacturing of goods overseas. Only 12% of the economy is manufacturing-based.
We enter the time of year where shorts find themselves curled in a fetal position on the floor while everyone else is having a good holiday time. Ask me how I know.
The market has retail investors exactly where it wants them: The market seems very toppy and there isn’t exactly any kind of Macy’s 20% off sale going on. No. You have to rush down to Macy’s at a 1/37th of 1% off sale. The only thing to do is to “already be long”. The number of traders who have beat simply buying and holding SPY (the SP500 index etf) or equivalent with ZERO trades all year is so close to zero it’s not even worth talking about.
The market has withstood each and every glitch thrown at it. End of the world, end of Italy, crappy (un)employment numbers, stagnant GDP numbers, the prospect of consumers getting smoked on their healthcare premia and thus not being to splurge on Chinese crap over Xmas. Instinctively, the dollar should be weakening on QE-forever, but the ten year is back to the 2.5-2.6% area (down from threatening 3% mere weeks ago) and oil is literally crashing.
Very little makes sense, but “making sense” is not “making money”.
Personally...I believe (and...”belief” is not a fundamental) that the market is actually applauding the intensified fascist/corporatist state.
I really have no specific reco. Buying on dips has worked EVERY TIME over the past 4 years. That’s an observation, not a reco.
I can’t see any good reason NOT to buy SPYders and leave it alone. “Reason” is not operative. The Fed cannot abandon its stance. The mere threat of such drove the DJ down over 1000 points about a month ago. I think we are living in a synthetic environment and it kind of reminds me of the period right after 9/11/2001. The US kind of shut down. Gradually, folks poked their heads out from under their rocks. The ones who did so first, benefitted most. In a far more slo-motion way, I think we are in roughly the same position, though later in the scenario. Like it or not, we have 3 more years of 0bama, and his best advertisement is the relentless rise of the stock market despite truly lackluster economic performance. I acknowledge that unlike that point in time, the market is not now depressed. Indeed it’s at AT highs.
The only thing I can not seem to convince myself of is that there is a reason for this to stop. I don’t see it. I don’t see the preference for the cash that would result from selling stocks. I sure don’t feel it, the charts don’t say it. But bull, bear, skeptic or fanatic, you can never, ever be short during T-giving > Xmas. Never.
All that “Quantitative Easing” is going into inflating stocks...nothing else.
Even back then, the whole "buy gold" argument puzzled me. If the U.S. dollar was really so worthless, then why were all these traders so willing to accept these "soon to be worthless" dollars in exchange for their precious gold bars?
Furthermore, if the doomsday predictions ever came true and the U.S. economy suffered a total collapse, then how would I go about using all those gold bars that I stored up? Would I take a gold bar down to the corner store to buy milk and bread? How would I get my change?
Lastly, if I ever showed up at the corner store with a bar of gold, how likely would it be that somebody would follow me home? I would say very likely.
I guess someday the gloom and doomers will be correct but in the meantime, I've been doubling my net worth on average about every 6-7 years with the stock market (rule of 72 principle combined with dollar cost averaging).
I’m sick of this “DOW’s up, DOW’s down” crap. Fluctuation is normal.
Amounts that are not adjusted for the loss of purchasing power of money are meaningless.
The health insurance sticker shock will kill holiday spending.
Obama is doing everything to hurt the economy and the fed is artificially creating a stock bubble because with interest rates at artificial ridiculously low rates there is nowhere else for money to go but stocks.
Having said that the statement above is way off. In 1999 there was a tech stock bubble with the average P/E ratio in the 40s. P/E is now 19 which is higher than average but nothing like 1999. Nonetheless the market is being artificially held up so major correction could happen at any moment
I think Aquila48 and Attention Surplus Disorder have the best description of reality I’ve seen.(IMHO).
Once the Fed’s monopoly money stops, the markets will crash.
Inflated currency.
As long as interest rates remain near zero, the stock market looks attractive.