I don’t know about you, but I find that sometimes I feel that certain things in my life become stale. My guess this is true for many folks, since most have jobs and surveys show time and again that people often find their jobs have become stale. The question always is: what to do? How does one bring freshness back to something they have been doing a long time?
I feel this way about this column. I actually love writing it, but for so many years, I have been fighting against the forces of negativity, the forces that have been suggesting the market is artificially high, overbought, and otherwise a house of cards ready to collapse at the slightest hint of breath.
Well, they have been blowing hard for some five years now and the cards are still standing and they will keep standing for some time to come. I am tired of saying this, of demonstrating over and over again that the reality for the market is not the turbulence of flying through a storm; it is the landing at the destination safe and on time. For the market, “on time and safe” means earnings reports that come in above, at, or near expectations.
The market is not about the market, per se; it is about the individual players in the market; it is about companies that make money, and, for some time now, way over four years and counting, enough individual companies are landing safe and on time so that the overall market is up, way up.
The market has weathered all the turbulence over the last five years. It has flown through the storms created from US political hacks mucking up the works, the breathless media predicting the demise of the European Union, the talking heads telling us about the impending collapse of the euro, the hill-top screamers prophesizing the end of the world as we knew it because the world could not survive the debt crisis in Europe.
I railed against all of this because I understood one thing – as long as the US economy was moving forward, companies would make money and as long as companies were making money, the market would rise. Yes, it is as simple as that. Well, not that simple.
I also understood that the near collapse of the financial system in 2008 scared the daylights out of the big-money powers. What happened then was about as serious a threat to those with the money as one can imagine. I understood in 2009 that those who wield the power behind the throne would never, ever, let things get so bad that the US economy would collapse or, for that matter, the EU, the euro, or Europe itself. I knew then that those powers would do whatever it took to get the powerfully rich really rich again. Hence, we have seen governments across the globe stepping up and stepping in with money, or, rather, the illusion of money. It has all happened the way I knew it would.
Now, we are almost back to a state of normalcy. I said almost. We still have more of the economic, technological, energy, social, cultural, and political transformation to go through and that means quite a bit more turbulence on the way to the safe and on time landing.
Mind you, the time we are in now is the most upheaving transformation the world has seen since, well, I could be hyperbolic and say the invention of the wheel, but that is not entirely accurate. The idea of the wheel spread slowly and the newer technologies that exponentially grow from such a technological leap took centuries to manifest. No, the time we are in now is closer to what happened after the invention of the printing press – the intellectual renaissance. But even that momentous transformation came about some 100-150 years after the invention that led to mass learning.
Today, it is computers and the Internet. All of their myriad ramifications are leading the way to mass learning. The difference this time, however, is the effect is immediate and synergistic and this will cause turbulence in everything from healthcare to oil markets, from entertainment to how our children see their place in time and how they interact with the world relative to that view.
Yup, I see understand all of this, and it is exciting, which makes me think about an answer to my question about bringing freshness back to something that has become stale. It is time to let go of the economic argument, as the economies of the world will continue to move forward until they don’t, which happens in cycles. The larger point is, like the market, they will hit some turbulence here and there, but they will end up landing safely and on time for some to come. The “transformation” I wrote about will see to that.
So, bear with me as I find my position on this new flight. My goal, as always, is to bring the plane in when playing the market. I want to continue making money in this game and that means locating and finding the runways on which to land safely and on time. That means finding stocks that will make money in both the short and long term.
- Greek borrowing costs dropped to the lowest since 2010 as a surge of confidence in the euro area’s rejuvenation buoyed the region’s bonds and stocks, rekindling faith in the 18-nation bloc.
My column today doesn’t mean I will totally resist the temptation to point out that good economic news is forward momentum for the market, at least it is supposed to work that way.
Trade in the day; Invest in your life …
