In history, the evidence is overwhelming: Stock market bottoms happen, and then stocks jolt upwards while the economy keeps getting worse - sometimes by a lot and for a long time.
I'm sometimes accused of being hostile to mutual funds. That's not fair, really. There is a place for them. Still, I am hostile to one thing, which is trying to use funds to time your way in and out of the market. That's a recipe for very bad results.
Fundamentally cheap stocks are often held in low regard by market participants. Something may be tainting their perception in investors' minds.
I've long loved emerging markets airlines because they usually sell at bargain prices. The troubled history of developed market airlines unfairly taints these stocks. In the emerging world, they're growth stocks.
I never liked quantitative easing. It's misunderstood by almost everybody. Flattening the yield curve is not stimulative; flattening the yield curve is anti-stimulative.
All equity categories, correctly calculated, create near-identical lifelong returns. They just get there via wildly differing paths.
The latter part of bull markets are typically led by stocks that are seen then as high quality, but the ones that do best are the ones that weren't seen as such high quality before.
You may have seen my firm's ads screaming, 'I Hate Annuities.' Folks ask why we run them. Simple: Because I do.
Investors covet past improvements but also always believe pricing unimaginable future creativity and efficiency gains is Pollyannaish. And they're always wrong. Bet on it.
Anyone can see how if a feared tax hike doesn't happen, that's a positive factor. But even if tax hikes happen as feared, vast history tells me it doesn't have to have the big bad impact folks fear. And fear of a false factor is always bullish.
The upward move at the beginning of a bull market is almost always huge compared with the vacillations late in the bear market. If you try to pick a bottom, you will miss a good part of the action.
The bubble, as investing phenomenon, has been well studied ever since the 17th-century tulip bulb frenzy. Its counterpart in bear markets is not well understood.
Both cheap value stocks and more glamorous growth stocks can work well in a portfolio - if done right.
If you can predict where the market's going, just do what you can predict. If you can't, which is the presumption of dollar cost averaging or time cost averaging, either one, then you're trying to ease in. But if the market rises more than it falls most of the time, easing in is, by definition, a loser's game.