Good call.
However the good times AREN'T back.

 

Far from it. I honestly feel the worst has yet to come with the blatant disregard for fiscal responsibility. Relatively soon the US treasury bill will no longer be viewed as such a worthwhile investment to other countries and they will stop loaning so much money to us. As a result we just print more and more and dig the hole deeper and deeper.

 

the worst time will be by end of the year. smart people predict even bigger housing bubble burst closer to mid this year.

 

RISE



I stumbled on to this thread searching for some other stuff. That's the amazing thing about the internet, message boards, etc: it gives you a historical log in near-real time of people's thoughts and actions.

You can almost track the capitulation to the March 2009 bottom.

 

---- ive been so out of the loop because of schoolwork, that I though another big drop had happehed and then recovered as I was reading this. It made me mad because I thought I missed a good chance to buy.

thread revival FTL

 

It's funny to see some posters still advocating the same thing after four years, even though they were proved completely wrong in time. But, wait, maybe this time they'll be right, amirite?

And holy ----, Joe Perez' economic posts are awesome. Why don't you get into economics anymore Joe?

 

Much like ZX-Tex's thread about exiting "the market," these threads prove to me why such massive moves are so difficult to execute successfully:

You have to be right not just on the exit, but again on the re-entry.

Had someone "sold out" on Jason's first post (10-10-2008; $SPX closed at 899), then bought back at any time between then and 07-10-2009 ($SPX closed at 879), they would have done well.

But what you see instead is the number of people really starting to capitulate right around the first week of March. The $SPX intra-day low was March 09, 2009 (666). I bet most of the people that made big moves out waited until things "felt better" and then bought back in at higher prices.


Then again, you also saw some opportunistic buying that could have worked really well taking advantage of the volatility: AAPL, inverse ETFs, etc. Too bad Joe didn't max his margin that first week of March, eh?

 

Interesting I did exactly the opposite of Jason’s advice in 2008. I stopped paying extra on the mortgage and started contributing the maximum amount to my 401k into mutual funds. I contributed the maximum amount all the way down and all the way through the bottom with the Dow going to 6600, it is now over 13000. I still have a mortgage which I had intended to pay off but now it’s financed at an extremely low fixed rate locked in at pretty near the all-time bottom of the rate market. Luckily I didn’t go upside down on the mortgage as the house lost 200k in value and I didn’t really lose that because I didn’t sell. I probably would have done better if I moved some out of company stock and into mutual funds as they have recovered better than my company stock Over the last 4 years though.

I think my approach did reasonably well.

Bob