The message from John Hussman in his newest weekly marketplace commentary,
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The whole factor is value studying, but here is the nut:
The S&P 500 is still below where it was a decade ago, and even with the benefit of its recent advance, has underperformed Treasury bills for nearly 13 years. The cause is that traders could not have cared less about valuations during the late-1990's, and failed to recognize that they were still inappropriately rich between 2004-2007 (as they are again today). Speculators can get all kinds of enticing advances going over the short-term, but over time (complete industry cycles and longer), regardless of whether one looks at post-war data or pre-war data, valuations determine the long-term returns that traders achieve in stocks.
As we move through the coming months, resolving the "two data sets" issue will help us to determine which set of historical precedents is relevant. If the current economic environment produces fresh credit strains similar to previous periods of credit difficulty in the U.S., Japan and elsewhere, valuations and margin of safety will remain the most important consideration in determining investment positions. If the economic situation reveals itself to be more like typical post-war cycles, valuations will still be an important consideration, but we'll be better able to assume that speculation (provided sufficient evidence from market internals) will be reliable even in the absence of clear fundamental support from valuations.
I certainly don't expect that the mortgage securities in bank portfolios and at agencies such as Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac will ultimately be made whole by cash flows paid by homeowners. But we can't fully reject the possibility that the Fed and Treasury have kicked the can down the road far enough, and that the FASB has obscured disclosure sufficiently,
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And then a little bit of industry philosphy:
Over the past decade, it has been an uncomfortable lesson to accept that investors may be relied on to behave in ways that are ultimately unsustainable and destructive to their wealth, as long as market internals are temporarily supportive. It's one issue to say, "From every historical precedent, we know that this is going to end badly, and investors will lose a great deal of their wealth, but for now, they are speculating anyway." It's another factor to add, "and since they are, we are actually going to rely on traders to continue behaving dangerously, and join them." Even though we've substantially outperformed the S&P 500 with smaller periodic losses over complete market place cycles, there is no denying that periodicaly riding the coattails of speculators, so to speak, would have made our margin of outperformance even greater.
It's unlikely,
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And then finally, a dig at CNBC for creating this mess, whereby traders are dumb and unable to correctly read the economic signals:
I've thought about this a great deal, and I suspect that just as the experience of patients is determined by the quality of information they get from their doctors, the behavior of traders is likely to be only as sound as the quality of the discourse and advice they receive from investment professionals. In reflecting on why the past 15 years have been so riddled by irresponsible speculation, it is impossible to ignore the rise over that same period of widely-viewed financial programming that is equally riddled with cartoonish content that encourages short-term thinking and speculation (buy-buy-buy! sell-sell-sell! boo-yah!). When we observe a clear change in the quality of analysis on the financial news, and the departure of its more speculative elements,
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During the late-1990's bubble, it struck me that the discourse on CNBC was remarkably similar to the sort of discourse that I had read from news archives preceding the 1929 crash. As I wrote at the time, what was surprising was the extent to which investment professionals,
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Read Hussman's full commentary here >