THE #1 REASON WHY THE SECULAR BEAR ISN’T OVER YET
by ilene - July 16th, 2009 3:30 pm
Unless this time the greatest "contrarian long-term secular indicator of all time" no longer applies, this bear market is not finished. Although if you’re short, you’re ability to trade it may be. – Ilene
THE #1 REASON WHY THE SECULAR BEAR ISN’T OVER YET
Courtesy of The Pragmatic Capitalist
The end of investment fads tend to coincide with sharp changes in investor sentiment and long-term secular moves. No one has represented the excessively bullish & leveraged market of the 80’s, 90’s and 00’s more than Jim Cramer. He worked at the most highly leveraged hedge fund on Wall Street – Goldman Sachs. He took a dotcom firm public and promptly lost 95%+ for his shareholders at the peak of the market in 1999. He ran a super beta tech hedge fund in the leverage driven 80’s & 90’s (which I guarantee you underperformed the Nasdaq 100 on a risk adjusted basis), and he now runs the bullish of all TV bullish shows – “Mad Money”. The show basically begs small investors to be reckless with their hard earned cash. It borders on financial negligence in my opinion, but that’s for another discussion. No one has been a better icon of the excess of the 80’s and 90’s than Cramer himself.
Cramer is a powerful man. The mere mention of a stock can send shares soaring. (If investors are truly upset about the stock manipulation that Goldman Sachs and high frequency traders are accused of they should be extremely alarmed about Cramer’s show – no single person has manipulated more stock prices in the history of the stock market). When this phenomenon began several years ago I was dumbfounded. I asked myself: “who would buy these stocks in the after hours market at such a steep premium?” Late last year the trend had waned. The stocks Cramer recommended didn’t soar. Cramer’s power had declined. After all, he had called the bottom to the bear market on 3 separate occasions (all wrong), had recommended Bear Stearns just weeks before they went under, recommended Wachovia just days before they went under, top ticked the banks in a bet with Eric Bolling in what has to go down as one of the worst market calls of all time and even proclaimed in late September 2008 that “the bounce means the crash can’t happen”. His track record was…