I copy the following from The Real Money.com, since it is a paid website. Don't laugh, I felt the same way. The speaker is Norm Conley and this small piece is certainly worth of my whole year's subscription.
"I'm theoretically on vacation but given market events I've been working for most of the week at an undisclosed location (i.e. Northern Wisconsin).
First of all, let me say that I did not foresee the depth or sharpness of this correction. Didn't see it! Kudos to those who did, namely Doug Kass.
That said, today's activity smells like capitulation to me. I could be wrong, of course, but the broad-based, high-volume, indiscriminate selling of stocks across 9 of 10 GICS sectors (Financials being the notable exception) is telling to me.
Other tells include the massive intraday swings (% and points) in a lot of widely-owned stocks, as well as the ease with which truly cataclysmic historic market events are discussed as a very real possibility. Markets put in bottoms when the worst-case scenarios seem not only feasible but likely. We are at or near one of those points right now. Also, anecdotally, the level of emotion on this site reminds me of the fall of 2002 and spring of 2003. The stress levels run high, emotions get frayed on both the bull and bear side of the equation, egos get bruised, etc. As always, I think it is better to focus on the ideas than the people putting the ideas forth. Everyone on this site has, at one time or another, been wrong. The discussion is the valuable thing, not the conflict.
I do not think that we are entering a 1931 or a 1987 market situation. This feels more like 1998 to me. A quick check of our site archives for the month of August 1998 (what a great feature) will show you what I mean.
Again, I could be wrong, but I look at this as a correction not a cataclysm. Despite lots of sound and fury to the contrary, stocks are not dramatically expensive and by many measures are cheap. The S&P 500 is trading at 14x earnings. Treasury yields are low. The economy is not in full-blown collapse and corporate CEO's just reported a strong quarter for earnings. Corporate balance sheets are strong. And, if there was any concern about complacency in the investor base, I think that stock investors are a long, long way from complacent right now.
I'm a fan of market history, because I believe that history doesn't repeat but it rhymes. My data tell me that it is highly unlikely that the market will be down significantly from here over the next two months. Again, I could be wrong, but that's what I think.
My studies of market history also make me very very suspicious of large macro predictions. The reason is that while some very smart people are able to predict the course of macro events, even they are often wrong when it comes to predicting the follow-on or derivative events. A quick example of this... In 1989, a few very intelligent prognosticators (including Jim Rogers and Felix Zulauf) predicted the demise of the Japanese economy and the Nikkei. They were a bit early but they were absolutely correct in their prediction. However, their derivative prediction was that the U.S. stock market would enter a long and terrible bear market. It made sense... How could a super economy like Japan implode without bringing the U.S. down with it? But even though it made sense, it didn't happen. You might remember that U.S. stock investors did okay during the 1990's.
I trimmed our portfolio today to raise a bit of cash - roughly 12% - to get ready to redeploy into some of our favorite names - some new, some oldie but goodies. I'm not betting on the Fed or anyone else, I'm betting on a basket of growth stocks that I think will recover from this drubbing the fastest. Good luck to everyone... Whether you are bull or a bear, these kinds of environments can cause one to make a variety of really meaningful mistakes. Be careful."
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