Wednesday, May 5, 2010

Careful

"Its different this time."
-Famous Nameless Lost Dead Investors.
This is what is carved into most headstones of people who have lost their shirts in the stock market. 

We all try not to get involved or caught up in these market slides, but inevitably we all go down with the ship in one way or the other. I may not lose money when stocks go to Mexico but when TBTF institutions go out of business its my tax dollars that are being looted to bail them out. In truth every market cycle is or has something different than the previous, but also each market cycle has its own distinct characteristics. Like leverage and over margined investors. The copious amounts of liquidity on the way in but no liquidity on the way out. We all should ask ourselves how is the current market environment any different than past situations?

I would not buy this dip.
I think we are in the midst of a minimum 10% correction.
After over a year of stellar gains of some 80, almost every major market guru has even more gains yet for the broader averages. Many of these parrots say that a correction is still a year away and that as long as the Fed/Treasury is your friend you have to be long this market.

I posted over the weekend about sentiment.

http://tradersutra.blogspot.com/2010/05/watch-sentiment.html

Albert Edwards Of SocGen Has these charts to further explain that buying the dips will get investors in the end.




When the fundamentals no longer matter, we have to take a second look at our books. When investors main thesis is how a bailout can be engineered in the home country of that investment, it is time to sell equities and all risk assets.
This is macro investing as it is today.
People have to be out of their minds to buy equities just because the backstop for their losses is the government. This is why there is rioting in the streets of Greece this morning.

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