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Further to my last Weekly Market Update, this week's update will look at:
I’ve never been rattled by human death. I’d probably be a better grief counselor for those who have lost pets, since that has always affected me far more deeply. Even the event of losing my most brilliant engineer – which I’ve written about at some length – didn’t really shake me for a few days.
But I bring up death as a segue to sharing a tale I’ve been meaning to share for many years. It is about the death of a friend when I was 18 years old, and his name was Kurt McFall.
As a thirteen-year old, I moved out with my family to the little town of Moraga, a suburb of San Francisco which was described as a “bedroom community” (which was a polite way of saying a solidly upper-middle class town; not as well-to-do or high-strung as Palo Alto, but close). About fifteen miles northeast was a city called Concord, which was larger, more lower-middle class, and pretty much a place most Moraga kids would have no reason to visit.
(more…)In the perpetual cycle of the masses buying toward market tops and
capitulating toward market bottoms, I often think of the old Wall Street
adage; “It’s always darkest before the dawn” which refers to the fact
that market bottoms come when the news regarding the fundamentals and
the outlook for the markets and economy is horrible yet the
deterioration looks almost certain to continue going forward. I’m sure
there is a good corollary to that statement out there somewhere which
essentially says that things are looking great at a market top and just
about all forecasts and trends point to things only getting better from
there… or something along those lines. With that, I leave you with
these two Google searches using the same keywords, the first one limited
to headlines over the last month and the next one limited to headlines
over the month preceding the market top on May 2, 2011, just before the 5
month & nearly 22% plunge in the index.
