Posts with keyword Stock Market→

Not long ago, national economies were more or less isolated from one another, and major shake-ups in one country – whether geopolitical (civil unrest, military coup, invasion) or natural (earthquake, tsunami) – rarely affected the economy of another.
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(This post is a part of the series on Basics of Finance and Investing.)

In simple terms, a market is where buyers and sellers meet to exchange goods for money. This basic concept still works in the sophisticated world of finance, except that there are now four organizational levels depending on the nature and volume of transactions.
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I generally avoid reading predictions of the government’s move every time the market hits a rough patch, as is happening now. Guessing the mind of Fed chief Ben Bernanke – if he will cut the interest rate again to soothe investor sentiment – has become as much a suspense as predicting the stock market.
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And it is all in our brain. Greed and panic – the two primal human emotions – are regulated by specific regions in our brain, and they in turn control how we as investors react to market unpredictability. In an insightful article today, Jason Zweig discusses the latest advances in neuroeconomics, the branch of science that probes human brain to understand investor behavior.
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In a recent BusinessWeek interview on current market volatility, John Bogle – index fund guru and Vanguard founder – made the following comments:

In the long run, investing is not about markets at all. Investing is about enjoying the returns earned by businesses. And the stock market is nothing but a giant distraction in that quest to acquire returns that business earns.

Without telling anything new, this quote still reminds us of the big picture of investing: a buy-and-hold strategy for the long haul is the only way to escape the ravages of market swings, and to benefit from the slowly (and surely) growing economy. I recommend reading the entire interview.

Since July 19 this year, when Dow Jones Index rose to a record 14,000 points, it is down to 12,845 at yesterday’s closing (even falling below 12,600 at one point). That is almost 10% drop in less than a month, nearing the official definition of a market correction. Is this a precursor to a bear market? Here are CNN Money’s 5 ways to know:
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US stock market has just closed for the day with all major indexes again taking big dives: Dow Index is down by 387 points (a single-day 2.9% drop, 2^nd worst of this year), S&P 500 down 44 points (3% drop), and NASDAQ down 57 points (2.2%). In the rest of the world, London’s FTSE Index was down 1.9%, Tokyo’s Nikkei up 0.8%, India’s SENSEX down 1.4%, and Australia’s ASX up 1.1%. These are the times when many investors begin to ask if they should jack up their stock holding in foreign markets. After all, the domestic and foreign markets rarely move in lockstep, and having a chunk of my asset allocated to foreign stocks should minimize any impact of a major domestic slump.
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If we look at the data for a broad stock market index, such as the Dow Jones Industrial Average or S&P 500 Index, three things jump out of the page. The first one is good news – there is a strong upward trend in market movement over the entire recorded history. This means that holding onto a diversified portfolio should fetch significant gain over long term – a popular retirement strategy for many who still have several years left before hanging up their boots.
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Now that the stock market has gotten into another volatile phase – swinging up and down in sync with jittery investor sentiment – the dooms-day forecasters and soothsayers alike have started coming out of the woodwork. There are as many advisers warning us “sell-off time is NOW”, as others saying “the bull market is still on, even though bull run may be over”.

This is also the time when a few market timers catch their lucky break. If stock prices fluctuate without any apparent regularity, by pure chance anyone can succeed once in a while in offloading just before a crash. But market almost always recovers as rapidly as it falls. Kiplinger recently noted that a timer has to be lucky not once, but twice – to get out at a high, and also to get in at the next low. Even that kind of luck is occasionally possible, but consistent market timing would be a rare feat indeed!

Last week ended with the second major stock market slump of this year that has barely gone through its first half. After a turbo-charged run over the last 5 months (since the first slump of ’07), during which Dow Jones Index rose 2000 points to cross 14000 for the first time on July 19, it dropped 700 points in the space of only 7 days since then (see picture). All the other major US market indexes also moved in a similar way, as expected (here is S&P500 Index). Someone in Wall Street made a comment that the bull run has finally ended, even though the bull market is still on. Go figure!

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