I have nothing to add to my recent market commentary. I shall leave you with a follow-up to this analog, which I think will be ripe for entry Friday.
Slope of Hope Blog Posts
Slope initially began as a blog, so this is where most of the website’s content resides. Here we have tens of thousands of posts dating back over a decade. These are listed in reverse chronological order. Click on any category icon below to see posts tagged with that particular subject, or click on a word in the category cloud on the right side of the screen for more specific choices.
Permabull****
Over at MarketWatch, columnist Paul Farrell put together a list of the denials and assurances that permabulls have offered up in recent history. It's a nice way to reflect on how bromides never go out of style. These were all offered up just before and in the early stages of the 2000-2002 market collapse.
March 1999: Harry S. Dent, author of “The Roaring 2000s.” “There has been a paradigm shift.” The New Economy arrived, this time really is different.
October 1999: James Glassman, author, “Dow 36,000.” “What is dangerous is for Americans not to be in the market. We’re going to reach a point where stocks are correctly priced … it’s not a bubble … The stock market is undervalued.”
August 1999: Charles Kadlec, author, “Dow 100,000.” “The DJIA will reach 100,000 in 2020 after “two decades of above-average economic growth with price stability.”
December 1999: Joseph Battipaglia, market analyst. “Some fear a burst Internet bubble, but our analysis shows that Internet companies … carry expected long-term growth rates twice other rapidly growing segments within tech.”
December 1999: Larry Wachtel, Prudential. “Most of these stocks are reasonably priced. There’s no reason for them to correct violently in the year 2000.” Nasdaq lost over 50%.
December 1999: Ralph Acampora, Prudential Securities. “I’m not saying this is a straight line up. … I’m saying any kind of declines, buy them!”
February 2000: Larry Kudlow, CNBC host. “This correction will run its course until the middle of the year. Then things will pick up again, because not even Greenspan can stop the Internet economy.” He’s still hosting his own cable show.
April 2000: Myron Kandel, CNN. “The bottom line is in, before the end of the year, the Nasdaq and Dow will be at new record highs.”
September 2000: Jim Cramer, host of “Mad Money.” Sun Microsystems “has the best near-term outlook of any company I know.” It fell from $60 to below $3 in two years.
November 2000: Louis Rukeyser on CNN. “Over the next year or two the market will be higher, and I know over the next five to 10 years it will be higher.”
December 2000: Jeffrey Applegate, Lehman strategist. “The bulk of the correction is behind us, so now is the time to be offensive, not defensive.” Another sucker’s rally.
December 2000: Alan Greenspan. “The three- to five-year earnings projections of more than a thousand analysts … have generally held firm. Such expectations, should they persist, bode well for continued capital deepening and sustained growth.”
January 2001: Suze Orman, financial guru. “The QQQ, they’re a buy. They may go down, but if you dollar-cost average, where you put money every single month into them, I think, in the long run, it’s the way to play the Nasdaq.” The QQQ fell 60% further.
March 2001: Maria Bartiromo, CNBC anchor. “The individual out there is actually not throwing money at things that they do not understand, and is actually using the news and using the information out there to make smart decisions.”
April 2001: Abby Joseph Cohen, Goldman Sachs. “The time to be nervous was a year ago. The S&P was overvalued, it’s now undervalued.” Markets fell 18 more months.
August 2001: Lou Dobbs, CNN. “Let me make it very clear. I’m a bull, on the market, on the economy. And let me repeat, I am a bull.”
June 2002: Larry Kudlow, CNBC host. “The shock therapy of a decisive war will elevate the stock market by a couple thousand points.” He also predicted the Dow would hit 35,000 by 2010.
Please Disable AdBlock
I have a favor to ask of some of you.
In spite of steady, strong traffic to the site, I've seen advertising dollars drying up. This didn't make much sense to me, but a number of folks have written me saying they don't even see ads.
The reason is simple – – more and more browsers have AdBlock running on them, thus disabling the ads and depriving me of the few pennies your views should generate. What you should see is this (that is, Slope with ads):
But, with AdBlock, you see no ads:
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It doesn't cost you anything, and doing the above only takes a moment. Thank you.
Bought Epocrates with Target of $14
The Fed Can’t Save the GDP Numbers
Data released today shows that the Q2 Final
GDP fell short of meeting expectations as it came in at 1.3%
versus 1.7%.
The graph below shows that it's generally been in
decline from its peak in December 2003. For the past three years, it's been well
below the average seen from 2004 to 2008…proof that the Fed has kept
the markets artificially inflated since they are currently trading back
up at 2008 levels, or much higher as is the case in the Nasdaq 100 Index,
without the fundamentals to support current prices or continued growth
expectations at the same pace, particularly without the assistance of joint
political economic efforts/policies, as has been the case to date.
