People do dollar cost averaging because they have regret of making one big mistake. But the fact of the matter is that, mathematically, the market rises more of the time than it falls. It falls, but it rises more of the time than it falls.
The bubble, as investing phenomenon, has been well studied ever since the 17th-century tulip bulb frenzy. Its counterpart in bear markets is not well understood.
Both cheap value stocks and more glamorous growth stocks can work well in a portfolio - if done right.
I never liked quantitative easing. It's misunderstood by almost everybody. Flattening the yield curve is not stimulative; flattening the yield curve is anti-stimulative.
If you can predict where the market's going, just do what you can predict. If you can't, which is the presumption of dollar cost averaging or time cost averaging, either one, then you're trying to ease in. But if the market rises more than it falls most of the time, easing in is, by definition, a loser's game.
Environmentalists should like fracking for its relative cleanliness. But they don't. They have made a bugaboo out of the chemicals in fracking fluids, which supposedly can leach into groundwater sources. I'm convinced they're dead wrong. Ultimately, good technology with a cost advantage will win out over paranoia.
In history, the evidence is overwhelming: Stock market bottoms happen, and then stocks jolt upwards while the economy keeps getting worse - sometimes by a lot and for a long time.
Normally, the market peaks before bad news emerges. That's what happened in 1929, and that's what happened in 2000.
Long before folks fretted the demise of 'quantitative easing,' I fretted its existence. It proved the reverse of its image, an antistimulus, and we've done okay not because of it, but despite it.
Buy into good, well-researched companies and then wait. Let's call it a sit-on-your-hands investment strategy.
China frequently confounds stock market prognosticators because it has a penchant for straying markedly from other broad global indexes year-by-year over the decades - even from emerging markets. It's hit or miss.
One component of the leading economic indicators is the yield curve. Bond investors keep a close eye on this, as it illustrates the spread or difference between long-term interest rates and short-term ones.
Back in the '60s and '70s, data were scarce, and while analysts knew that companies with fat gross margins lagged those with thin gross margins early in bull markets - and overachieved in the later phases - they couldn't do much about it.
China's stock market is inextricably tied to politics.
Anyone can see how if a feared tax hike doesn't happen, that's a positive factor. But even if tax hikes happen as feared, vast history tells me it doesn't have to have the big bad impact folks fear. And fear of a false factor is always bullish.
Buying only what you know can end in disaster. Just think about Enron's employees and business partners, the 'locals' who bought lots of its stock because they thought they were in the know.
If you've taken Econ 101, you know that the quantity of money rises only when the banking system makes a net loan.
Fracking opens up vast tracts of the U.S. to exploitation by gas drillers. There's enough energy under our feet to last us for decades, maybe centuries.
Most investors give too much credence to the theory that prices are rational; they presume that a market collapse must have been justified by serious economic trouble.
What is the most common investor mistake? Trading - getting in and getting out at all the wrong times, for all the wrong reasons.
