Gold, Bonds, & “Maybe History Has Stopped”

THE TREND IS YOUR FRIEND… MAYBE
When markets are trending, they can appear unstoppable. Every sale in a rising market feels like a bad one, and every purchase in a rapidly falling market is punished by losses within minutes or hours. It is so much less painful to go along with the trend than to buck the trend – at least in the short or possibly medium term. Furthermore, in the modern world of super-leverage and group-think, valuations can go far beyond the estimates of every expert and practitioner. That is, of course, until they stop.
One of the main challenges of a long career in money management is that the distance (in terms of time and cost) between an intelligent conclusion that prices are massively wrong in either direction, and the actual reversal of valuations toward the range of ‘reasonableness,’ can sometimes be too long to bear. One could have easily become stridently bearish on stocks in 1995 (as we did), when in America equity prices passed all-time highs by nearly every measure, selling at 22 times earnings, a level that was previously reached in only September 1929 and March 1972 (both serious peaks). But they did not top out until early 2000 at 40 times earnings. And, in October 2008, those who thought that markets had fallen as far as they possibly could, and backed that belief with massive buying, found themselves weeks or months away from what was an extraordinarily painful and confusing bottom, with horrifying losses mounting by the day.

This post was published at Zero Hedge on 11/05/2014.