Has the market got you down the past few weeks? We hate to say it, but we told you so! In fact, the following is an excerpt from an article penned just seven weeks ago:
It seems that the market’s recovery since the 2008 crash may be petering as the flow of good news on the economy has stopped flowing. The biggest issue remains above-average unemployment; and though personal incomes are up, the rise hasn’t been sufficient to encourage investors.
This confluence of factors has, unfortunately, led to what is beginning to look like a stall in the recoveries of the US economy and financial markets.
There’s an old saying in finance that “markets don’t react to the same news twice.” Right now, that’s exactly where we find ourselves. Over the past two years the picture has brightened for the US economy as business has stabilized, and the market has rallied on that optimism. Now the news has stopped improving and the market has stalled.
And yet, investors remain surprised now that the market is suffering, despite the complete absence of any good news to drive it higher.
Admittedly, the market hasn’t exactly been in free-fall since our warning at the beginning of April. However, exiting the market at that time would have helped investors avoid the several percent slip from the markets top on April 29th (measured by both the S&P 500 and the Dow Jones Industrial Average).
Our whole contention here is that there is a time to be in the market and a time to sit on the sidelines. The last twelve months have been, for lack of a better word, stellar (at least for our clients). Now that the spigot of good news has basically run dry, it appears time to reduce exposure in the markets.
This conclusion is not based on intuition or tarot cards, but is the result of time spent on economic research and analyzing market technical indicators; research that most advisors either don’t do or purchase with the hopes that it’s correct. However, the quality of our research is also why we regularly serve as a resource for the media.
More importantly, the endless hours we spent keeping careful pulse of the economy are why our clients pay us. Our insight allows us to make investment decisions based on what we see coming that, hopefully, will be profitable for ourselves and our clients.
So when we write in an article that the way what we’re seeing “is beginning to look like a stall in the recoveries of the US economy and financial markets,” you can bet that (1) that it’s not a conclusion we’ve reached by happenstance, and (2) that we’re using that insight to base investment decisions for our own assets and those of our 500+ clients.
Getting back to the circumstances developing, we maintain that what we’re seeing at present is just what we wrote seven weeks ago: a stall. As is true of stalls, we expect this to be temporary rather than long-lasting. We still are not bearish on the US economy or the market, but markets do fluctuate; and we believe that this market has run about as far as it can until the headlines improve.
