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  • Maybe Obama's advisors aren't that bad after all
    For all of you that complain about Obama's economic policies it could have been worse.  Much much worse.  At least McCain didn't win.

    McCain advisor one year ago today.
    Tags: McCain, Luskin, Graham, Obama
    Sep 15 09:47 am | Link | Comment!
  • Broken clocks and perma-bears

     

    Perma-Bears are all the rage these days. Everywhere you turn there is some economist or analyst that “correctly predicted the market selloff.” Guess what? They didn’t. Most of these guys (and they are all guys as far as I can tell) have been predicting the end of the world for the last 10 or 20 years. Don’t get me wrong, I feel the same about the Perma-Bulls too. The only difference is that in the 20 years I have been trading the Bulls have certainly had more time in the sun.
     
    My title is probably a little misleading. You might have thought I was implying that Perma-Bears are right twice a day. They are not. They are better compared to my oven. When the power goes out, the clock on my oven restarts at 12:00 and just happily counts the time from that point on. No blinking. Just business as usual. You can imagine that it is pretty rare that the power comes back on at exactly noon or midnight and I don’t have to fix the clock. But happened yesterday. While I am sure that the oven could have written a couple of op-eds in the WSJ and made some appearances on CNBC with adoring intros like "one of the few ovens that correctly predicted the time" the offers did not come pouring in. That is probably because even CNBC recognized that my oven has been wrong 99% of the time after a power outage. However, the media doesn’t seem to hold the same standard for the Dr. Dooms of the world.
     
    In a long enough timeframe most of these guys will be proven right but that doesn’t make them prescient. No one who only takes one side all the time should be listened to any more than my oven. Ever. Even worse are the junior Perma Bears who come out of the woodwork and add to the echo chamber. I would like to tell you that the sudden popularity of the Perma Bears is a contrary indicator but it is not. They are not even negatively correlated to the stock market. Their correlation is zero. Just like their credibility.
    Tags: QQQQ, SPY, sentiment, Roubini, economists, PermaBears
    Jul 22 01:26 pm | Link | 1 Comment
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  1. Broken clocks and perma-bears (1 Comment)
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economists, Graham, Luskin, McCain, Obama, PermaBears, Roubini, sentiment
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