Mostly because the people hollering when it goes down can’t write about it when it goes up the next day, or they look stupid. The people who would write about it going up are too busy making money to waste time crowing about it making up lost ground.
Unfortunately, it’s the bear mongers who scare people into not buying stocks. If all they read about are the down turns, they’ll never invest.
But, of course, then they can write stories about the sorry state of the average American’s retirement outlook.
Does seem like too much focus on the daily fluctuations. Seems to me things like 5 day (last week DJI was down 1%), 1 month (down ~5%), and 3 month (down ~4%) would paint a better picture.
It’s hard to make that an attention grabbing headline I guess.
All you could hear in '99-2000 was how the NASDAQ and the Dow were bear-proof. I think a little bit of pessimism every now and then is a good thing.
Two halves of the same coin – the average investor overreacts to short-term market movement. The financial press makes this easier, because they’ve got to sell magazines or get lots of web clicks.
So when the market’s up, you get tons of articles about how obvious it is the party’s going to last forever. When the market corrects, it’s thousands of articles about tulip bulb mania and the Great Depression. Lots of Monday-morning quarterbacking saying how obvious this was to see coming. Excessive pessimism (IMO) that goes far beyond what is warranted.
My (completely unsolicited) advice – ignore attention grabbing headlines and stick with a reasonable asset allocation.
The fed left the key rates unchanged again. Armageddon!!!
Despite gloom and doom and the occasional market drop, if you put your investments in an S&P 500 fund and kept investing at a steady rate over your working life, you’d end up doing extremely well over the long run. Very few fund managers outperform the S&P 500 over a long period of time.
Past performance is not a guarantee of future results. :P
The biggest threat is that the dollar decline is going to accelerate because of this, Bernanke is going to crank the presses up and run them until wheelbarrels replace wallets like in Weimar Germany 1929. The housing bubble alone is not apocalyptic. It is in combination with all the other factors pulling the dollar down.
Those of you who think this is simply a correction occurring at the same time as $80 a barrel oil, three losing war fronts and China threatening to sell all dollar debts off in economic blitzkreig are smoking cats**t right out of the litterbox. This is the sort of timing that brings down nations in a fortnight.
Most Amerikwans display the same kind of hubris that characterizes all nations in history just before they get their asses waxed and handed to them in a bag.
This time next year, don’t be surprised if it’s babies, the other white meat.
This scares me. I am so going to buy a underground bunker to hide in.
But wait! Global warming scares me more and less than a few blocks away a whole neighbourhood was evacuated becasuse rain/flood ruined everything, so my underground hideaway can’t be underground and our highest ‘mountain’ is less than 200 meters above sea level (and not for sale).
What am a man to do?
I don’t know, but you obviously have less than a fortnight to figure it out. Better get cracking!
That’s a pretty strong opinion, eh, Cleve?
That’s about as mild an opinion as you’ll ever hear from Cleve.
I think he’s on best behavior for the moment, but I just can’t wait to hear his thoughts on president Obama.
Shot at 2007-08-08
Well, looks like Cramer might have been somewhat right after all.
Stocks on Wall Street today suffered their biggest one-day decline since February after the turmoil in the home-loan market caused renewed concerns about tightening credit worldwide.
The decline began at the opening bell after a French bank, BNP Paribas, suspended operations of three of its funds in the wake of turmoil in the American market for home loans. The European Central Bank and the Federal Reserve injected cash into the financial system because of tightening credit markets.
Whee! No one knows how much the big hedge funds are worth! No one knows whether ANYONE has ANY money! Panic in the streets! Bernanke holds fast to the tiller as the waves are breaking over the stern and the sails are snapping!
Wonder just exactly how many dominoes are about to fall?
You stay out of this Cleve, reality is plenty exciting enough, we don’t need your fantasy apocalyptiverse horning in.
If we don’t bail them out, some other country will. Heh. But who knows what Bernake is up to? This guy.
An easily understandable editorial on the effect of the subprimes on todays European markets
Something wicked this way comes.
The sky is falling! The sky is falling!
For those in the financial services sector, or those improperly diversified, it probably looks that way. However, for once, W actually is right – the fundamentals of the U.S. economy are sound. What’s tight right now is credit, which is particularly bad if you’re a highly leveraged idiot in the financial services sector.
Also, note that the European Central Bank dumped approx. $130B into the market today in an effort to shore up the European financial services sector. sigh So much for allowing markets to designate winners and losers…
Like huge trade and government deficits? Or a collapsing home market? Or being unable to adjust interest rates up for fear of the Chinese or down for fear of inflation?