It’s almost never openly admitted in public, but the reality is that few if any investors actually beat the market in the long-term. The reason for this is that most of the investment strategies employed by investors (professional or amateur) simply do not make money.
Economic data can be and is commonly used as a political tool. The EU is just the latest example of this. In the US we’ve seen this same game played out using GDP numbers.
How is inflation of 2% acceptable? Why is this base assumption never challenged? At this rate, in 10 years you’ve lost roughly 20% of your purchasing power. And during the average worker’s lifetime, they will see a 40-60% decrease in purchasing power.
Yellen is the head of the San Francisco Fed. There is a lot of misinformation about her on the web, but the fact of the matter is that she is a career academic with absolutely zero banking experience or business experience.
The last two years have seen a number of high profile Tech IPOs for businesses that are barely profitable or have never turned a profit. Indeed, of the tech firms that went public in 2013 so far, 73% have never turned a profit (compare that to just 27% of the tech IPOs that were unprofitable in 1999).
A total of 60 months have passed since the Fed announced QE 1. The Fed was not engaged in major monetary interventions in only six months out of these 60. Put another way, the Fed has been actively intervening to the tune of billions of dollars in 90% of ALL months since it began QE 1.
This is the single largest allocation of investor capital to stock based mutual funds since 2000: at the height of the Tech bubble. That year, investors put $324 billion into stocks. We might actually match that inflow this year as we still have two months left in 2013.
QE failed for Japan. It has failed for the UK. It ha failed for the US. Collectively, countries comprising over a third of the world’s GDP have proven QE doesn’t work.
The market has only been this expensive a handful of times in the last 100+ years. Every time we’ve been closer to a market top than a new bull market run.
I have a business I would like to sell you. Let’s run over the numbers first. First and foremost, I have to be honest, this business has not implemented a budget in five years. I know that seems like an insane way to run a business, but I can assure you that management is comprised of highly intelligent, ethical people.
Bernanke couldn’t stomach this kind of deleveraging. The reason is simple: those who have accumulated great wealth as a result of this system are highly incentivized to keep it going. Bernanke doesn’t talk to you or me about these things. He calls Goldman Sachs or JP Morgan.
By keeping interest rates near zero, the Fed has been hoping to push investors into the stock market. The hope here was that as stock prices rose, investors would feel wealthier (the “wealth effect”) and would be more inclined to start spending more, thereby jump-starting the economy. This has not been the case. Instead the entire capital market structure has become mispriced.
Earnings can be massaged in countless ways to beat estimates. You can release loan loss reserves, massage depreciation numbers, implement one time charges or writedowns, reprice bonds, etc.
The fact is that the markets are significantly overpriced. And based on over 100 years worth of data, this kind of overvaluation usually precedes a market peak.
