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A bull market climbs a wall of worry -- on record volume.
Yeah, I know, it's different this time. Pay no attention to the bear
behind the curtain, and all that.
However, at the end of the *last* bear market, in 1983 -- yup, that
long ago -- Granville sell-orders caused bloodbaths with boring
regularity, a stockholm-syndrome economy had recently been delivered
of Keynesian monetary apparatchiks at the Fed and elsewhere, and
Henry "Dr. Doom" Kauffman opined offhand that interest rates *might*
come down finally... and pop! went the market, sending the NYSE
volume through the roof. (Record volume then was around a hundred
mill. Yesterday, ladies and germs, it was upward of 2 point something
*billion* shares).. Back then, I was a mail-cart-pushing,
key-punching "administration" clerk at Morgan Stanley in Chicago,
chief scrounge for a bunch of Masters of the Universe, and everybody
at Morgan thought the resulting price-pop was just a technical rally
and wouldn't last either. :-). Six months later, people *still* said
it wouldn't last, and a girlfriend's uncle was saying that it was too
late, he'd missed the train, so he was going to stay out 'till the
market came back down a bit. By that time, the Dow was at, what,
1600? I wonder if he's still out, waiting...
A 40% decline is a big chunk of change, boys and girls, even if it's
40% of a bubble. Actually, by my count, it's 100% of the bubble, but
that's just me. After all, Amazon and EBay's P/Es still need a
pressurized cabin to breathe in.
So, yes, the market may go lower, but not much more, relatively
speaking. At some point, and fairly soon, I bet, someone's going to
realize that, even though you wouldn't want to actually trade one for
a house, tulips are still nice things to have around.
Hint: Interest rates are rediculuously low, they aren't going up any
time soon, and, if we can survive the election, the recently-started
CEO witch-hunt won't be too much more than Street theater, probably
not resulting in much in the way of regulation or legislation. The
threat of which, frankly, probably caused this recent explosive
decompression in the first place. Your tax dollars at work, if you
will.
So, in light of the erstwhile bloodbath on Capital Hill, and the real
one we just saw a few days ago in the market, it may be time for
people to remember what Mr. Rothschild said, and buy now while
there's blood in the streets.
As to whether the accounting is "rigged", remember what Robert
Heinlein said: "Who cares if the game is rigged? You can't win if you
don't play."
Cheers,
RAH
The aforementioned girlfriend, by the way, traded *me* in for an
actual Rothschild in 1984, after I insisted on going back to school
and talking my way into the back door at the University of Chicago to
boot. The cost of anything being the foregone alternative, it
sometimes seems to me I'm *still* paying for that detour, but that's
a bear of a different color, and it's okay as long as I don't look
behind the curtain, right? :-).
- --- begin forwarded text
From: Somebody Else
To: "R. A. Hettinga" <rah@shipwright.com>
Subject: Re: It's back? Triple-digit Dow gains at 2PM...
Date: Wed, 24 Jul 2002 21:44:19 -0600
Bob,
So.  Let's see.  The market's all the way back up to... what? Last
Friday's
close?
Iiiiirrraaational iinnndeed.
<Somebody's .sig>
- ----- Original Message -----
From: "R. A. Hettinga" <rah@shipwright.com>
To: "Digital Bearer Settlement List" <dbs@philodox.com>
Sent: Wednesday, July 24, 2002 2:02 PM
Subject: RE: It's back? Triple-digit Dow gains at 2PM...
> At 2:55 PM -0400 on 7/24/02, Somebody wrote:
>
>
> > The market doesn't close for two hours.
>
> The market just closed. Up 496.63, 6.45%, at 8198.9697.
>
> :-).
>
> You never catch the upticks if you don't stay in the market...
>
> Cheers,
> RAH
>
> --
> -----------------
> R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah@ibuc.com>
> The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/>
> 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
> "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and
> antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found
> agreeable to
> experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman
> Empire'
>
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--
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R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah@ibuc.com>
The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/>
44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
"... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity,
[predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to
experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'
http://xent.com/mailman/listinfo/fork