What has amazed me about this downturn in the markets is how conventional market wisdom has been thrown out on the street like whores on a friday night. Yeah, I said it!
Two years ago when the markets started to soften, market pundits were calling for a 9 month slow down and soft landing. (For some reason analysts love pinning their predictions to a 9 month period.) There was no awakening to the obvious change that was taking place across the board. The talk instead focused on finding some sort of logic as to why we should believe the markets should recover quickly.
I am not saying that you can't be wrong. Everyone is wrong. Nobody knows for sure what is going to happen. But the Group-Think mentality and limited perspective of financial media and professional analysts create an audience of lemmings. Financial media should have open dialogue and there should be more discourse to enable consumers of financial information to make better informed decisions.
That will never happen. The Street knows how to make money in a rising market. A rising market keeps investors happy and happy investors don't sell out of their mutual funds and wrap accounts. If investing is gambling, your advisor is the house. And the house doesn't like to lose out on it's bonus.
The strange thing now is that the Bullish bias has given way to a Bear bias. Having been roasted as the markets sold off, everyone is now too chaistened to challenge the belief that financial meltdown must surely be coming.
The solution: Cancel your news subscriptions. Turn off your TV. It's your money. No one is going to care for it like you. Take control and stop looking for other people to tell you what to do.
