If I were to disprove your points, you'd simply argue that I'm cherry-picking, not looking at the whole picture, demand that I make some prediction about specific events, and on and on. In short: you'd simply just keep shifting the goalposts until you got to something that couldn't be proven wrong and then proclaim you were really right on something far-removed from the original point.
If your argument consists of looking at the very top of a bull market, then comparing it to the very bottom of a crash (as you did in post #931 and again in #943) - then yes, that's obviously cherry-picking.
My point was, despite short-term volatility, the stock market rises over the majority of ten-, twenty-, and thirty-year periods. The longer the period, the closer that percentage gets to 100%. I'm not sure how you can accuse of me shifting the goalposts. My position is stated clearly. It's also true - this is obvious to anyone who objectively looks at the data.
See "prove something conclusively, otherwise I'm right" above. However, let's just try "sell when the market drops 20% off a high, wait until the market goes up 20% off a bottom before buying back in." Yeah, you miss rebounds off the very bottom; you also miss some big drops off the high. You end up significantly better off than just buying and holding through all the dips.
I'll leave it to you to do the math.
Have you actually done the math? The strategy you're suggesting isn't new - and it's a bad one. It would have caused you to lose a lot of money over the past forty years. It would have served you well during the 2008 crash (very well, actually) - but you would have lost money during most other market fluctuations from 1980 to present. Overall you would have ended up behind a simple buy-and-hold approach.
See "prove something conclusively, otherwise I'm right" above.
What are you even arguing here? My initial post was advice to someone just entering the workforce (i.e., someone with a 30+ year horizon). Forget the (considerable) volatility in 2020 - are you suggesting that the stock market is likely to be lower in 30 years than it is today? Do you think they'll come out ahead investing in treasuries, which you've mentioned a few times? (Those are currently yielding 1.27% over 30 years - less than inflation).
I'm right because the data conclusively backs my position. (That's in reference to the positions I've actually taken. Not once have I speculated about where the market is headed in the short term. I don't know that - and neither do you, if you're being honest).
This is the "market is always efficient" argument that's been shattered countless times across history, but every time things are going up, up, up its proponents scream THIS TIME IS DIFFERENT!
Whether the market is efficient is an interesting question (I don't think it's perfectly efficient - so we're in agreement). My point was - if someone has magically found the way to beat the market, I very much doubt they'd publish it for free on the internet.
Sure, it was all the pandemic's fault. Not "companies are obscenely valued while profits are stagnant, debt is increasing, companies are forking over free cash flow to pump up stock prices so that EPS looks better and better to pump up stock prices even more." Not "we're in the 11th year of a bull market now being pumped up by declining interest rates because the Fed believes the economy is simultaneously really strong and too weak to survive even 2.5% interest rates after having near-zero interest rates for nearly 7 years." Not "the bond market is signaling there's an issue as implied yields start to increase for lower-rated debt and investors are seeking safety out on the curve instead of near-term." Not "the Fed suddenly started ramping up repos for allegedly 'everything is fine, this is just a test' reasons which didn't pass the sniff test to anyone who thought more than 2 seconds about it."
No, it's that goddamn pandemic - that is the only problem. Everything else was perfect!
The pandemic was the pin that happened to prick the bubble. If it hadn't been the pandemic, it would have been something else - and, based on comments like above, you would have excused it as some freak thing and argued that everything was really fine.
If you're disputing that the stock market plunge was directly caused by fear over the pandemic (and the economic effects of social distancing), I'm not sure what to tell you. Do you not see the cause and effect relationship there?
By the way - I've never argued that "everything was really fine". Not sure if you're confusing me with someone else. What I actually said was, over the long term, the markets will recover from this. If someone had extra cash sitting around, there was a great buying opportunity a few weeks ago. Now that the market has significantly rebounded (it's up approximately 25% in three weeks), I'm no longer convinced that stocks are deeply discounted. If the market dips 20%+ again, I'll revisit that position and will most likely buy more.
Right, let's track it all the way into a market peak where he points out valuations are at all-time highs. That's a great way to measure value. It's as bad as touting all the gains from S&P 676 to S&P 3388, totally ignoring the drop from S&P 1565 to 676, and saying "I'm up 500% over that time, I did so great! It proves everyone should always be in stocks, they never go down!"
Hussman is up front about his mistake in this. Has been repeatedly. No, we don't know what would have happened had current strategies been in place throughout this bull market. Just like we have no idea what would have happened had Congress not threatened FASB and prompted the suspension of FASB 157, which allows banks and other companies to mark assets that they don't believe the market value of to whatever they want in order to ignore the possibility that they might actually be bankrupt.
You're using the "he's been wrong, so he can't possibly be right now" fallacy. You should double-double-triple down on all such statements, instead of looking for context and trying to get the full picture. God knows I wouldn't want you and others to admit you might be wrong about what's really going on.
For the record -
you were the one who brought up Hussman, not me. It would have been easy for me to pick him as an example of how being consistently bearish on the market will cause you to lose a lot of money over long-run. See the data I already posted - since 2000, the market has more than doubled, while Hussman's fund (designed to track the S&P) lost more than half its value. You would have made more than four times as much money just buying & holding the S&P.
You were free to "look for context and get the full picture" as your account balance shrunk to one-quarter of that of a buy-and-hold investor. Or does an article (interesting as it may be) trump twenty years of empirical evidence?
In fairness - just because Hussman has been consistently wrong for two decades, it doesn't mean that his fall 2019 article is necessarily wrong. That's a fair point. But you're dismissing his poor track record far too casually. I can provide some of his articles from seven or eight years ago - when he did the same thing, claiming a recession's just around the corner and the S&P (which has more than doubled since then) was "overvalued, overbought, overbullish". That's his shtick - he's been bearish since the turn of the century. He'll eventually be right through chance alone.
For the record - I posted the complete history of his fund from its inception (July 2000) to present. I'm not cherry-picking anything, I'm showing all the data that exists. In that period there have been three significant (>30%) market corrections, so it's not like this bearish investor never had a chance to be right. He was right some of the time - it's just that, he missed out on so much growth in the years that he was wrong, that he lost a lot of money overall.
Ultimately, if you're trying to convince me (or other people) to ignore some very basic principles (such as, the market will rise over the long-term), you're going to have to do better than some cherry-picked numbers and one article from a fund manager who has been spectacularly wrong over the past 20 years.
I'm up about 25% overall since March, could have done much better, but I'll take it as a newbie.
