11 Commonplace Market Views: True or Myth?
by ilene - February 17th, 2010 6:52 pm
11 Commonplace Market Views: True or Myth?
By Susan C. Walker, courtesy of Elliott Wave International
"Cash on the sidelines is bullish for stocks." Have you ever heard some stock market pundit utter these words? Have you ever wondered if the statement were true? Read this item from the latest issue of The Elliott Wave Financial Forecast, and you’ll wonder no longer:
Myth — Cash on the sidelines is bullish for stocks. This refrain rang like a gong all the way through the declines of 2000-2002 and 2007-2009. In February 2000, when mutual fund cash hit 4.2% (compared to 3.8% in November), The Elliott Wave Financial Forecast issued its “cash is king” advice. Once again, the word on the street is that there is way too much “cash on the sidelines” for stocks to fall precipitously. This chart shows net cash available to investors plotted beneath the DJIA. In December 2007, available net cash expanded to a new high, besting all extremes since at least 1992, a 15-year time span. Despite the presence of this mountain of cash, the DJIA lost more than half its entire value over the next 15 months. Indeed, as the chart shows, cash remained high right as the stock market entered the most intense part of the crash in 2008. Available cash does correlate with the market’s moves, but the market is in charge, not the cash.
--The Elliott Wave Financial Forecast, Jan. 29, 2010
Now take a look at these 10 statements and decide if they are true:
- Earnings drive stock prices.
- Small stocks are the place to be.
- Worry about inflation rather than deflation.
- It’s enough to simply beat the market.
- To do well investing, you have to diversify.
- The FDIC can protect depositors.
- It’s bullish when the market ignores bad news.
- Bubbles can unwind slowly.
- People can make money speculating.
- News and events drive the markets.
Bob Prechter and our other analysts have debunked each of these statements as a market myth. You can discover how we exposed these ideas as myths, and in turn make more informed decisions about your investing.
We’ve gathered the writings that expose these 10 statements as market myths in our 33-page eBook, called Market Myths Exposed. They come from two of our premier publications, The Elliott Wave Theorist and The Elliott Wave Financial Forecast, as well as two of our books, Prechter’s Perspective and The Wave Principle of Human Social Behavior
Susan C. Walkerwrites for Elliott Wave International, a market forecasting and technical analysis company.
*****
Market Myths Exposed for FREE
The 33-page eBook takes the 10 most dangerous…
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Why You Should Care About DJIA Priced in Gold
by ilene - January 10th, 2010 11:12 pm
Why You Should Care About DJIA Priced in Gold
"The Real Dow" has proven to be a good leading indicator for nominal DJIA.
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Dramatic drop" did indeed follow: Between October 2007 and March 2009, the DJIA lost 53%, high to low.
For more information, download Robert Prechter’s free Independent Investor eBook. The 118-page resource teaches investors to think independently by challenging conventional financial market assumptions.
(What's this?)
(Money Morning, 1/23/10)
(THE PRAGMATIC CAPITALIST, 1/12/10)
(Investing…
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Thrilling Thursday Morning - Jobless Recovery Edition
by Phil - July 2nd, 2009 8:26 am
As I mentioned yesterday, the ADP numbers were not good.
Now it’s one thing to see something happen and quite another to do something about it. One of the reasons we like to be in cash is we get to wait for the market to do something silly so we can bet against it. Yesterday was a gift as the Dow climbed all the way to 8,577 at 10:30 and we gave it a few minutes for the Crude Inventories, which were a disappointment for the oil bulls and our first Trade Alert of the day went out to Members at 10:35 saying: "OIH $95 puts are a good deal at $1.58." These trades don’t happen in a vacuum - we had been watching OIH all week and decided it was a safer short than USO, which also sold off nicely but the OIH was no slouch with the $95 puts finishing the day at $2.30 (up 45%).
Just a few minutes later, at 10:43, we were able to take advantage of the DIA $84 puts at .84, which finished the day at $1.08 (up 28%) and we were able to get back to cash while speculating on TOT $55 puts at $1.20 and BG $60 puts for $1.30 into today as we expected some downside follow-through to grip Europe, who were overly complacent yesterday. I wanted to mention this as I hear from many traders who are getting hit hard because they feel the need to stay "invested" for fear of missing something and the only thing you are missing in this market by not having a cash position is a good night’s sleep. Having cash allows us to pick our spots, make money and get back out to cash. We’re not day-traders but we sure as hell take our profits if we hit our goals in a day!
We’re still waiting for the market to pick a real direction but there are some things we do know and one of them is that oil is massively over-priced. AAA just released a report stating that the peak for gasoline prices has already passed and estimates that auto trips will be down 2.6% this summer. As I keep saying, people simply CAN’T afford to pay these pumped-up prices, no matter how much speculators wish it to be otherwise. Clearly the dumb money is following Goldman et al into the commodity game - just like last year and…
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Q2 Tuesday - Ending With A Whimper, Not A Bang
by Phil - June 30th, 2009 8:27 am
What happened to our great rally?
We started the quarter off well enough, with the Dow at 7,522 and S&P at 787 on April 1st, we flew right up to 8,000 on the Dow and 840 on the S&P the next day but then it took us the rest of the month to gain 200 more points and the last day of May we finished at 8,500 Dow, S&P 920 - nothing to write home about on the whole. June 1st was very exciting as we made all our gains for the month that day, flying up to Dow 8,800, S&P 944 but that’s where we called a top and cashed out and it’s been pretty dull ever since as we’ve bounced up and down between 8,800 and 8,300 on the Dow and 940 and 900 on the S&P, waiting for a breakout one way or the other.
It’s dull to stay in cash, it’s like going to the track and not betting on any races. We really thought we’d get a proper indicator by now and we had fun betting the downturn from the middle of June but even that fizzled and left us back in cash as we head into the holiday weekend. On the bright side, the VIX has come down substantially and we are now able to pick up long options again at reasonable prices. This will be fantastic and give us some great leverage but we still need the market to pick an actual direction.
At least now we have earnings coming so we can evaluate various sectors and place some bets for Q3 but index buying has ruled Q2 and the performance of individual stocks has been washed away as a factor as machine trading has yanked the broader market up and down on a daily basis. It used to matter how IBM or INTC was doing as an individual company, now the entire Nasdaq can fly to the moon and take PALM, AAPL and RIMM with it, even though it’s not very likely that all can do well in the same space for very long (remember MOT?). We are no longer deluding ourselves that 2Bn people in Asia and Africa will be sporting the newest smart phones on the beach next summer yet the pie in the sky valuations persist, as if there is infinite room for all competitors to sell in the global marketplace. In fact, emerging market valuations are are…
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Monday Market Madness - Last One in Q2!
by Phil - June 29th, 2009 8:18 am
What a nice, quiet weekend.
There was very little news of note and, despite a nervous sell-off in early Asian trading, the markets are back to their usual pre-market positions of UP. The Dow is up 100 points since 2:30 am, the Nas is up 2.5% as is the S&P and the Russell. Oil has been jammed all the way back to $70 after falling below $68.50 in early morning trading and the dollar has been pressed back down to 95 Yen while it once again costs more than $1.405 to buy a Euro and $1.66 to buy a pound. It’s no wonder we have such success playing the middle - "THEY" don’t allow the market to go anywhere else!
I really thought this morning they’d have trouble holding oil up as the IEA cut its 5-yer oil forecast for EVERY year through 2012 by 3 Million barrels a day (3.5%). In fact, according to the IEA, oil will not return to 2008’s consumption level of 85.6Mbd UNTIL 2012. “The deep economic recession that has spread worldwide in the past year has taken a severe toll on oil demand,” the IEA said in the report, updating estimates made in December. “This marks a break after several years of strong oil demand growth.” In its “lower GDP scenario,” which assumes that a rebound in the global economy will be 3 percent a year, the IEA said global oil demand could fail to reach last year’s levels by 2014, standing at 84.92 million barrels a day, 6.34 million barrels less than predicted in December.
Bloomberg led off this morning with the headline "Commodity Rally May End as Supply Rises, Speculators Sell Bets" but not all speculators seem to have gotten the message as speculation proceeds apace. “Commodities have gotten a little ahead of themselves,” said Walter “Bucky” Hellwig, who helps oversee $30 billion at Morgan Asset Management in Birmingham, Alabama. “As long as there’s uncertainty about growth, that’s going to be headwind commodities won’t be able to overcome.” The World Bank forecast for this year’s economic contraction to be 2.9 percent, rather than the 1.7 percent decline previously anticipated, may curb sales just as producers expand output in anticipation that the worst is over.
Hedge funds and other large speculators are holding a net 653,915 contracts betting on higher prices, according to an index of combined positions in 20 commodities tracked by the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission. Their net long position reached 854,743 contracts earlier this…
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Weekend Reading - Can American Consumerism Save Us?
by Phil - June 28th, 2009 10:30 am
There’s hardly any point doing a wrap-up as hardly anything has been happening.
If you are buried in the daily gyrations of the market, lots of stuff happens during the day but, as soon as you step back and look at the action - you’ll notice nothing really happened at all. After a catastrophic downturn on Monday, we pretty much bottomed out at 8,250 on Tuesday until Thursday’s 200-point bump and here we are, back at good old 8,450 - which is where we bumped along for pretty much all of May.
Indeed our best plays have, by far, been our premium burning plays, as attested by the very nice performance of our $111,659 Portfolio, our exercise in conservative hedging that is outperforming most risk-based strategies in this very choppy market. The other winning strategy in this annoying market has been Day Trading, and we’ve had fantastic performance from our Oxen Group picks each morning and Ilene has a good article what David looks for in "The 5 Keys to Identifying a Fundamental Day Trade." Combine that article with our Strategy Section and my article on scaling in and you have your own little day-trader’s manual!
This will be useful next week as we have a 4-day week (Friday is the observed 4th of July) and there’s no way we want to go into the 3-day weekend with too many positions so it’s going to be a lot of in and out trading once again. I probably shouldn’t, but I keep focusing on these silly fundamentals like Bespoke’s GDP chart on the right. These are FACTS, which are the things being ignored as you hear things like Friday’s Michigan Consumer Sentiment hit 70. I often point out that these are the same consumers - 60% of whom, when polled, believe their homes have held their value or gone up in value. Just because they are all chipper for the pollsters, does not mean they will be out there turning these economies around.
US consumers are the New York Yankees of global consumption. They are indimidating, they are record-setting and, from an historical perspective, they give the IMPRESSION of being unbeatable - but I grew up in New York and remember a streak from 1965 to 1975 when they didn’t win a single pennant. That’s a team that has averaged one World Series Title every 3.3 years since 1923 (26 Times World Champs) and one League Championship every 2.3 years over the same time period. Like the US consumer, you come to EXPECT the Yankees to be in contention and…
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Philip R. Davis is a founder Phil's Stock World, a stock and options trading site that teaches the art of options trading to newcomers and devises advanced strategies for expert traders...
Ilene is editor and affiliate program
coordinator for PSW. She manages the Favorites backup site
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