Investing General Discussion

Locnar said:

Wish this thread was more active. Seems the major U.S. Indexes are up a good 20 percent for the last 12 months. No end in sight, is a crash "RIGHT AROUND THE CORNER"? I've grown more and more acute of retirement and wanting, needing to retire early on the back half of middle age. I suppose the safest thing to do is just keep the 401k in low fee indexes and fire/forget, correct? I have a friend who has been thinking the market was going to implode for 2 years now and has kept his money in "safe" bond type investments that have made near jack shit.

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When the market is going to roll over there will be signs, people have been scared of this market since 2013 and have missed massive gains. Long term moving averages look nothing like 2008 or 2000, we are a forward PE in the high teens. No doubt a down turn will come but setting new highs is not bearish it's bullish that more highs will follow.

Investor survey's show no signs of t he bullish levels we see at market tops, fear is still prevalent. When people who never talk about stocks start talking about jumping in, if this thread starts getting tons of posts about making big bank, like bitcoin last year then it may be time to start becoming more cautious. Look up Chris Ciovacco on youtube and watch some exciting videos of 50 years of charts to understand just how large secular trends are.

The market break out in 2013 was a major move after a very long period of consolidation following the 1982-2000 bull market. 1996-7 range seems most analogous to where we currently stand which means we may see another 100% before the exuberance and excess truly froths over. The Fed (Interest Rates) will eventually kill this rally like all bull markets but we are quite away from that tipping pt IMO. That doesn't mean there won't be cyclical corrections but for people trying to retire it's very dangerous to time cyclical moves, they happen very fast and the recover just as quickly.

People looking to retire do indeed need to be concerned about secular trends but those decisions should be made slowly and diligently, and in an educated manner. Watching long averages like the 20 month average, you have to look past the noise of day to day price action. Read back in this thread every once in awhile we get a guy who just knows it's all about to crash and we are fucked and they are the smartest guy in the room, and that was about 30-40% ago.

Just remember fear sells, watch the price action the market is sending you the message, trade fears all year, new market highs. Trump drama, new market highs. Brexit! new market highs.

I don't post here often but I do follow this thread, I care enough about this community knowing we are all near each other in age if I see strong signs this secular bull trend is ending I absolutely will do what I can to talk about it hopefully in a concise manner without chicken little drama.