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kleinbl00  ·  2754 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Trading in a post-truth world

Point by point:

    One could argue that the day-to-day market swings don't have a lot to do with any longer term movements.

I think that by definition, day-to-day swings don't have anything to do with longer-term movements. At the same time, a market that responds so swiftly to any signal - regardless of its provenance - is not a healthy, durable nor rational market.

    One could also make the case that this kind of financial reporting is just picking whichever cause feels like a good fit for the effect observed. Not by which is plausible.

One could indeed. However, the assertion gains credibility in the absence of an alternative or contradictory hypothesis.

    Kleinbl00 you told us you aren't optimistic and went to cash for now, but what makes you think there isn't more time left in this bull market.

Historically speaking, bubbles last much longer than the doom-callers predict. The Crash of 1929 was being called in 1926; the Crash of '87 was being called in '86. Some of the guys I have been following have been predicting a bear market for eighteen months now; none of them has called the top yet.

In other words, there's every reason to predict that the bull market will go on a little longer. However, if you look at market trends over the past year or so we have gradual (or negligible) rises followed by abrupt, catastrophic falls. When the market moves, it moves like a ski jump. I, personally, am willing to skip out on some of the rise if I can skip out on most of the fall.

    Housing has gone out of control in a few places, but not so bad everywhere else.

Housing didn't go out of control "everywhere else" last time. It was the response of superheated markets that broke the world, not national or global uniformity.

    The equity bull market is historically long, but not so remarkable in gains, and there have been some corrections (Jan 2016) which have let of steam and kept people at least partially risk-aware.

This is why most people assert that markets are currently overpriced - market performance has been sluggish-to-even but equity prices are nuts. What corrections there have been have been negligible.

    I think there's a couple years left before there is a big drop in prices.

Rather than simply stating "I think you're 18-21 months long on that one" I will ask why you think this. What aspect of market behavior are you seeing right now that indicates there's another 2 years of runway on this bull market? What tea leaves are you reading? Because history doesn't repeat itself but it rhymes and apparently I'm not seeing what you're seeing.