Stock scream room

[dualstow]

harry dent is likely the worst predictor in history ..why he bothers to still do this stuff escapes me .

That’s how I feel about Stansberry. The answer in both cases: someone is paying for their useless prognostications.

[Kbg]

Doom porn to sell subscriptions, nuf said.

[Ad Orientem]

Not a fan of doom porn, but Warren Buffet is a hardcore stock bug and he is sitting on $128 billion in cash. More than a few people think the market is getting frothy and is due for a correction.

https://www.cnbc.com/2019/11/29/buffett ... ation.html

[mathjak107]

warren has tried to buy some private companies with that money but it did not go through . tech data was one .

he is on the hunt to buy but he has not found what he is looking for . don't forget he buys a lot of private companies we can't and they are uneffected in price by market drops since they dont trade on stock exchanges .

[dualstow]

Yep, Warren B was outbid by Apollo Global.

[Cortopassi]

Whatever has been going on since October is insane. Is it just me who thinks this is unsustainable? Yet nearly day after day, record highs. Wow.

% of stocks above 200 day MA is around 80% vs. 55% at the beginning of Oct.

I wouldn't touch stocks with a 20 foot pole unless I was in the PP, so we are all profiting from this, but it just seems so much smoke and mirrors. We go from WW3 starting to All is Well in 48 hours. It's like this is all running on a 2 hour movie timescale.

[drumminj]

I wouldn't touch stocks with a 20 foot pole unless I was in the PP, so we are all profiting from this, but it just seems so much smoke and mirrors. We go from WW3 starting to All is Well in 48 hours. It's like this is all running on a 2 hour movie timescale.

Agreed, I've been struggling with this as well. The only way I can convince myself to buy stocks is to remind myself I believe in the system of 4 assets, and I need to hold all four. It's still not been easy, though.

Then again, I have the same struggle with LTT and gold these days

[dualstow]

I wouldn't touch stocks with a 20 foot pole unless I was in the PP, so we are all profiting from this, but it just seems so much smoke and mirrors. We go from WW3 starting to All is Well in 48 hours. It's like this is all running on a 2 hour movie timescale.

I'm in the opposite camp. Stocks may turn out to be overvalued at any time, decimating shares. However, investing in stocks is betting on prosperity. People still to go to work, companies continue to create value and smoke & mirrors or not, stocks continue their upward trend, even with a ten-year hiccup between 2000 and 2010. If I had the stomach for it, I'd go 90% stocks.

EDIT: added a missing preposition.

[mathjak107]

Up until a few years before retirement I was always 100% equities.......as a long term investor there was never any logic to trying to mitigate temporary short term dips and permanently reduce my long term returns .....

I was well rewarded for it despite wars , 2 back to back recessions and the lost decade for equities...today I run in maintenance mode in retirement..... I range from 25-50% equities depending on where we are in the cycle. I no longer want the volatility of high equity allocations

[Ad Orientem]

I concur. Equities look pretty inflated right now. But then again so do bonds. People sometimes ask me where all the inflation is that I have occasionally warned of. And I just tell them to look at the stock market. If I were speculating I'd be over-weighting cash and gold.

[mathjak107]

Overvalued is hard to put a number on ...if earnings rise , or rates come down everything has a new view .

Everyone thought stocks were way over priced in 1982 after p/es doubled ...little did anyone know the greatest bull market in history was ready to take off

[Ad Orientem]

We are ten years into a bull market that pretty much smokes all that has gone before. Could I be wrong? Yep. Am I making any bets here? Nope. But if I was... I'd say this market is due for a correction. It will be interesting to see where this goes from here and how much longer the good times last.

[Kbg]

US Large caps excluded, we actually had a bear in just about every equity market Sep-Dec 2018 defined as 20% or greater DD.

[Cortopassi]

It will be interesting to see where this goes from here and how much longer the good times last.

If anyone wants to take the other side, I would be willing to bet big $ that the good times last at least until after the election in Nov.

I'll take that bet. When we've gotten to the point that the market goes up on Iran accidentally shooting down an airliner, something is F'ed up. I feel some black swan is coming before Nov.

Not saying the shooting down would be a 1000 point drop, but seriously, up? And up big? Does anything cause more than a 4 hour drop in stock prices anymore?

Gotta love Trump with his 409k and isn't your account up 70/80/90% tweet.

[dualstow]

I feel some black swan is coming before Nov.

Paradoxical statement. It’s not a black swan if you feel it’s coming.
Do you feel the market is overvalued, or do you think something truly strange is going to take us by surprise?

Many stocks are overvalued, but this does not feel like irrational exuberance.

[Cortopassi]

I am no seer, I just think that there is so much effort behind the scenes to make things look better than they are that something is going to break. What that is I don't know. What triggers it, I don't know.

It is just my BS opinion! Am I am perpetually negative on stocks since 2008 so I am still biased by that drop.

[dualstow]

Stocks on sale today, guys. Courtesy of coronavirus fears.

[Tortoise]

Stocks on sale today, guys. Courtesy of coronavirus fears.

It seems like every couple of years there are big news headlines about some abcVirus or xyzDisease, the stories show lots of pictures of people in public places wearing face masks and make it sound like there's going to be a global outbreak, but then after a couple of weeks it just kind of fades into the background and we don't hear any more about it.

Maybe I'm just ignorant, but I have a feeling this is another instance of the same.

[Kriegsspiel]

Stocks on sale today, guys. Courtesy of coronavirus fears.

It seems like every couple of years there are big news headlines about some abcVirus or xyzDisease, the stories show lots of pictures of people in public places wearing face masks and make it sound like there's going to be a global outbreak, but then after a couple of weeks it just kind of fades into the background and we don't hear any more about it.

Maybe I'm just ignorant, but I have a feeling this is another instance of the same.

Yea.

[Xan]

Stocks on sale today, guys. Courtesy of coronavirus fears.

It seems like every couple of years there are big news headlines about some abcVirus or xyzDisease, the stories show lots of pictures of people in public places wearing face masks and make it sound like there's going to be a global outbreak, but then after a couple of weeks it just kind of fades into the background and we don't hear any more about it.

Maybe I'm just ignorant, but I have a feeling this is another instance of the same.

Maybe this is the black swan part of things. The issue is that all such potential outbreaks fade into the background as you describe... until one doesn't. And we don't know ahead of time which is which.

[Ad Orientem]

Stocks on sale today, guys. Courtesy of coronavirus fears.

It seems like every couple of years there are big news headlines about some abcVirus or xyzDisease, the stories show lots of pictures of people in public places wearing face masks and make it sound like there's going to be a global outbreak, but then after a couple of weeks it just kind of fades into the background and we don't hear any more about it.

Maybe I'm just ignorant, but I have a feeling this is another instance of the same.

Maybe this is the black swan part of things. The issue is that all such potential outbreaks fade into the background as you describe... until one doesn't. And we don't know ahead of time which is which.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_flu

[yankees60]

Seems like just yesterday I was feeling bad about taking profits. I had not hit exactly 35% in stocks, and I also only did a half-assed rebalance, preferring to ease into it and finish at the point where the stock share would have hit 35%. That day never came. I really thought stocks would go wild after breaching 2000  (S&P). Needless to say, now I feel great about the premature rebalancing that I did do.

That's good to hear. I was waiting for my stock allocation to hit the 35% rebalance band, and it got pretty close--but then, just short of the mark, stocks started falling like a rock.

This is making me consider switching to 20/30 rebalance bands going forward.

From what I'm remembering you've subsequently written regarding this....you may have consider switching but you did not. Or, have you?

Vinny

[yankees60]

That's good to hear. I was waiting for my stock allocation to hit the 35% rebalance band, and it got pretty close--but then, just short of the mark, stocks started falling like a rock.

This is making me consider switching to 20/30 rebalance bands going forward.

Funny -- I had the opposite reaction.  Probably because I've been preparing myself for early retirement by working out strategies to minimize taxes, I tend to view rebalancing these days not as a profit capturing activity but as a (potentially) sizable expense.  If the PP keeps growing within the 15/35 bands while needing a rebalance only very rarely, that would be a fine outcome.  Or maybe I'm just lazy and thankful the markets may save me the effort for a while longer. 

And, I'm guessing that, for you, you have stayed with this assessment?

Vinny

[yankees60]

Hindsight bias.

The Golden Butterfly portfolio is B.S..  Does anyone really think such a "free lunch" is that easy to get all packaged up for you by your friendly neighbor, Mr. Wall Street? 

You're not gonna get more prosperity by data mining to the past. 

Forget Wall Street -- What about nicely packaged up by your friendly neighborhood charting guru? 

The Golden Butterfly is 80% Permanent Portfolio, and the extra 20% small cap VP simply tilts it slightly to prosperity with one additional low-cost index fund.  If it's purely a result of data mining, then we all have bigger issues.  I fully believe in the PP, so I'm not so quick to dismiss similar iterations of the same idea. 

The thing I most like about both the PP and GB is that their performances are remarkably independent of start date.  Now that's not to say that the future will be exactly like the past, but that's also not the point.  When you're investing in something that has done consistently well in all sorts of economic conditions, the exact order of the future is a lot less important.  IMHO that's a perfectly reasonable application of back testing, but everyone is entitled to their own opinions and portfolio choices. 

FWIW, after lots of consideration I'm also going into the GB (with minor tweaks) with my own money.  I'll be happy to report back along with Pointedstick how it goes. 

I think this may have been the first MachineGhost / Tyler Golden Butterfly "discussion" I've come across...

VInny

[yankees60]

The main reason I pointed this out is because the exact purpose of LTTs in the PP is for exactly the kind of conditions we are in now (no/lo/deflation) but we continually want to WIN (whip inflation now)!  I still find it amazing that people can't really stop or have a very difficult time not predicting which is the whole philosophy behind a PP.

I totally understand and would agree with tilting a PP to one's circumstances. A younger person definitely should up the stock allocation as an example or go with a leveraged version of the PP.

I'm really not an HB groupie as I have a lot of money in other trading strategies, but I think HB was very smart man. It is not often you see a strategy do exactly what it purports to do over a very long time frame. PP certainly does.

And, just before I'd read this gem by Kbg.

Vinny