NOBODY KNOWS FOR SURE

There's a lot of  concern around today about the Federal Reserve's inevitable, initial interest rate hike and just what the market will do.

That's a theme more worn than my last relationship with my ex-girlfriend.

There's no shortage of those who think another big as in bigger-than-before downturn hovers somewhere just over the market horizon. A few even predict a big, bad bear market. The market as you know--gratis the global money printers--has rebounded from much of its late summer woes.

In roaming around the web, it's always interesting to come across these various view points. Not that anyone knows for sure. They don't. Today, on a site we like to visit from time to time, The Daily Bell, is a couple reads worth reading: thedailybell.com/news-analysis/36621/Is-It-a-Crash-Yet-Two-Articles-Speculate.

Most of us allow our biases to disturb us. It's seems to be part of the human genetic code. Most likely it's been there before we even found out there was a code. Good investors have biases, but most tend to be directional rather than personal.That is to suggest they will learn from just about anyone.

A trader I once knew claimed he had a pet aardvark that would get scratchy at certain times. The guy claimed it was a decent warning sign that volatility was about to pick up. I never looked at his profit-loss statements, but he stayed in the game a long time and as far as I could determine he was sans a rich uncle.

The Daily Bell is a libertarian site. So for all you socialist, communists and anti-semi-capitalists out there, it might not be your personal bear call or bull call spread. In a semi-free society, we will leave that up to you.

Now we lived through the 1987 crash and recall vividly not only where but what we were doing that day as Sir Alan was on a plane to Dallas and how difficult it was to get a trade off through jammed phone lines to buy the stocks we wanted. In those times the Internet was in its infancy. As were cell  phones.

With the 2000 crash we were at the Las Vegas Money show just a few short weeks before that (what was known at the time as TMT) debacle hit the equity fan. Most of the signs, as people love to say in retrospect, were everywhere. The trouble with that statement is nobody was paying attention.

In December 2007 we closed our office to take a long deserved market respite. It wasn't necessarily owing to our market prescience, though we did a few months earlier pen an article about a lot of  new "Red Price Reduced" real estate signs suddenly popping up in SoCal in neighborhoods we were quite familiar with. But the timing seemed right because just a couple of months earlier our partner decided to retire as he motored his boat off into the sunset.

An interesting point in this author's article about hindsight is "...when your portfolio is down 50 percent it is hard to think clearly." True! But what many miss is it's equally as difficult to think clearly when your portfolio is up 100 percent and the sun keeps coming out every day. And don't forget your uncle Vinnie. Before he became an NFL guru, he was a market guru.

So we remain with a question that nobody knows the answer to, but a good starting point is the Zen notion about accidents: How long does it take before an accident happens? However long it takes.

Nobody knows for sure. But here's a closing market thought for you. It  may seem a bit mystical. Eckhart Tolle in one of his books defines Karmic action as "...the perpetuation of unhappiness."