The thing about the market is that there is no holy grail. No matter how hard you try, you’re not going to find it. The holy grail does not exist. We have to weigh the evidence knowing full well that we’re working with incomplete information. The idea is to accumulate all of the data and make a conclusion based on all of it, not just some of it.
Today, I want to go over a few of the divergences that have put the bulls in a precarious situation. There is a large crowd of permabull “passive” investors that are taught just to buy stocks and hope for the best. They are shown all of these sexy equity curves and told again and again how much they would have made had they invested in the S&P500 in 1950 or 1982 or whatever cherry-picked date is forced upon them.
It doesn’t make these people good or bad. It’s just what it is. I think it’s important for market participants to understand the way things work. Based on the tiny tiny sample size of a 100 years or so, sure a lot of these theories could make some sense. We’ve had less than a handful of secular bear markets during this time, so if you’re making decisions based on the outcome of a few short periods, then go for it. But it’s not something I would ever do.
We need to reevaluate the market constantly as the data comes in and understand that we have no idea what the stock market is going to do. In fact, I’m willing to bet that it will do something it’s never done. You know why? Because the market does something it’s never done all the time. There are only 100 years of history. It’s easy to do something that’s never been done with such little data and such an irresponsibly small sample size. It’s not just different this time, it’s different every time.
I want to reiterate that there is unlimited downside risk in the market right now and I don’t think it’s being respected. It’s not until afterwards that they ask, “what happened??”. And that’s when the blaming game begins: The fed, the trump, the ebola, or whatever excuse du jour is being regurgitated on the various media outlets. The only one to blame is ourselves. It’s our portfolio at risk. We are the only ones who profit when it goes up and the blame is 100% ours if we lose money on long positions when the market goes down.