My Stock Market Advice Three years ago, I told anyone who asked that I thought it was too late to sell, but too early to buy. Today? My take is that it’s too late to buy, but too early to sell. Based on my abysmal market timing, that no doubt means that now is positively...Read More
Three Reasons Investors Are in a Funk Gauging from investors’ current bleak mood, you’d guess that the Dow Jones was down horrifically — to 6,000 or 7,000 or even lower. Instead, while recent volatility has admittedly been through the roof, the Dow has “only” dropped to just below 11,000, as of this morning. That’s less than 15%...Read More
Should You “Just Get Out?” That was the most provocative question posed to Liz Ann Sonders, Chief Investment Strategist for Charles Schwab, at a conference call with investors earlier this week (I saw a taped version the next day). Her answer? “No,” because there are no accepted, reliable metrics for deciding: a) when to get out;...Read More
The Demise of Buy-and-Hold? Did you know that waves are an optical illusion (at least to a physicist)? While individual waves move forward — often at a locomotive speed, as in the case of a tsunami — the water molecules in them are actually stationery (more accurately, they move up and down, but end up...Read More
Investors’ Conundrum, circa 2010 In a nutshell, here is the problem confronting the stock market: World-famous, blue chip stocks — companies like Intel, to pick one example — certainly look cheap. At $18 a share, Intel, the world’s leading manufacturer of microprocessors at the heart of every PC — is trading at a surprisingly conservative...Read More
Explanation for Jumpy Markets Want a(nother) reason for heightened stock market volatility? More investors are switching from buy-and-hold to “FIFO”: first in, first out — and ask questions later. Such is the aftermath of a decade-plus of negative overall stock market returns. And that’s before inflation. As I’ve blogged before, welcome to “risk without return.”...Read More
