You may have seen my firm's ads screaming, 'I Hate Annuities.' Folks ask why we run them. Simple: Because I do.
— Kenneth Fisher
Readers regularly ask what can go wrong but almost never what could positively surprise.
If you can predict where the market's going, just do what you can predict. If you can't, which is the presumption of dollar cost averaging or time cost averaging, either one, then you're trying to ease in. But if the market rises more than it falls most of the time, easing in is, by definition, a loser's game.
The latter part of bull markets are typically led by stocks that are seen then as high quality, but the ones that do best are the ones that weren't seen as such high quality before.
If some stock categories get too hot-and-pricey, mass supply is created via stock offerings to tap that cheap money - and, when overdone, drives it all down.
Anyone can see how if a feared tax hike doesn't happen, that's a positive factor. But even if tax hikes happen as feared, vast history tells me it doesn't have to have the big bad impact folks fear. And fear of a false factor is always bullish.
People do dollar cost averaging because they have regret of making one big mistake. But the fact of the matter is that, mathematically, the market rises more of the time than it falls. It falls, but it rises more of the time than it falls.
Investors covet past improvements but also always believe pricing unimaginable future creativity and efficiency gains is Pollyannaish. And they're always wrong. Bet on it.
I never liked quantitative easing. It's misunderstood by almost everybody. Flattening the yield curve is not stimulative; flattening the yield curve is anti-stimulative.
Normally, if you have a huge category that leads a bear market all the way down to the bottom - like tech after 2000, or energy in the '80-'82 bear market - you get one quick pop, and then years of lag as we fight the old war.
