by ilene - August 21st, 2010 5:06 pm
Courtesy of Mish
Ken Fisher says high levels of pessimism are a reason to buy stocks. Please consider Kenneth Fisher Recommends Stocks as Pessimism Surges.
Rising levels of investor pessimism are a reason to buy equities now, billionaire Kenneth Fisher said today.
“I’m never going to be bearish when people are pessimistic,” Fisher, who oversees $35 billion from Woodside, California, said in an interview on “Bloomberg Surveillance” with Tom Keene. “My bias when pessimism is high is to own equities.”
Explaining Ken Fisher’s Bias
Ken Fisher’s bias is to own stocks come hell or high water. Fisher’s recommendations have as much to do with optimism or pessimism as the planet Pluto does with an octopus.
Fisher makes money being perpetually bullish on equities. It certainly helps that Fisher peddles advice that people and pension funds want to hear.
It is amazing how much money one can make mismanaging money in conjunction with a remarkably successful advertising program.
Addendum
Flashback February 26, 2007
Housing Boom!
For months now the debate has been over whether America will have a hard landing or soft landing, the answer hinging on how big 2007′s housing disaster turns out to be. Well, there won’t be any housing disaster. We won’t have a landing at all, soft or hard. Right now the U.S. and global economies are both accelerating.
The consensus forecast is for single-digit S&P 500 earnings growth tied to a slowing economy. Disbelieve it. Experts’ forecasts have been too low for four years and will be now. First, the accelerating economy will deliver earnings that exceed expectations.
This is a time to own stocks. Here are some companies that will participate in the prosperous economy of 2007:
Home builder Pulte Homes – PHM
Toll Brothers – TOL
Beazer Homes – BZH
Absurdities
Look – Anyone can be wrong, but quite frankly that is absurdly wrong.
Pulte Homes was $34 then. It is $8 now.
Toll Brothers was $34 then. It is $16 now.
Beazer Homes was $44 then. It is $3.75 now.
Someone let me know if he ever issued a sell signal on those.
Regardless, Ken Fisher is consistently bullish. In fact he HAS to be bullish because you cannot manage $35 billion without being bullish. Ken Fisher’s advice is designed to do one thing – make money for Ken Fisher.
Mike "Mish" Shedlock
Photo from Psychology Today.
Tags: bias, bullish, Ken Fisher, market, stocks
Posted in Phil's Favorites | 1 Comment »
by Zero Hedge - June 1st, 2009 2:14 am
Let’s talk about relationships, you know, the statistical ones.
Courtesy of Marla Singer at Zero Hedge
Hoping that our readers might enjoy a sneak preview of what we were working on, we decided to
post our preliminary results on the Chrysler dealer data we crunched all weekend.
It will be a cold day in hell before we do that again, you can be sure.
The reaction was complicated by my typing "Why would there be an significant and highly positive correlation between dealer survival and Clinton donors?"
I didn’t mean "statistically significant," but that was all it took. A number of blogs fixated on this sentence and ignored the next two, "Granted, that P-Value (0.125) isn’t enough to reject the null hypothesis at 95% confidence intervals (our null hypothesis being that the effect is due to random chance), but a 12.5% chance of a Type I error in rejecting a null hypothesis (false rejection of a true hypothesis) is at least eyebrow raising. Most statistians would not call this a "find" as 95% confidence intervals are the gold standard for this sort of work." You can imagine the result.
As a measure of how partisan this issue is, both sides of the aisle had it out over sentence structure all day. We were severely chastised (in my case rightly so) and that was further complicated by my posting without explanation, the results of six regressions absent any narrative about our experimental design, our order of testing and the like. This subjected us to "data fishing" criticisms. (Probably warranted to some small degree- though some readers went so far to accuse us of outright fraud). What began as an attempt to give our readers some transparency devolved into a mess of sound bytes. The fault is entirely mine for expecting civil peer review or anything like it in such a forum. A mistake I shall not repeat with early findings again.
The slew of email I received ranged from "thanks" to "you are the spawn of the devil." The latter is the obviously closest to the truth, so we are sending that reader the Marla Singer Stolen Jeans prize. His name was Robert Paulson.
We planned to release the data publicly today, but we are having second thoughts about that particular plan.
…

Tags: bias, Chrysler dealer, closings
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