Inliers: Not Every Swan Is Black

Ryan Krueger  Jun 12, 2009 1:25 pm

Inliers: Not Every Swan Is Black
 
So what if not much happens, for a change?
 

 

I listened to really smart bond guys that love stocks in here. I heard from some of the sharpest stock guys that love cash in here. I was told anecdotally about some of the most conservative investors who are all of the sudden looking to get into anything at all in here. And that was just yesterday.

Bears have pressed short interest higher right in the middle of a 12-week (and counting) streak of net fund inflows from the Bulls. The battle lines are drawn. Yet the most anxious of all appear to be the record crowds in cash, worried that’s being turned into trash. So where do we go from here? Even bloggers, a group not short of opinions, have suddenly lost their keyboards with that answer.

Birinyi & Associates keeps track of the top investment blogs’ sentiment. The “neutral” among them have hovered around 20% for most of the 12 months. In the last 2 months, confusion rallied “neutral” all the way up to 55%.



Perhaps the most fascinating to me, of all the different opinions and datapoints recently, is the one I found where many bulls and bears are correlated for the first time that I've ever seen. More on that in just a moment.

But first, I think most investors are looking for something, anything that is consistent in a world without solid 5-year growth like that pictured in the chart below.

chart

What is it? A group of completely transparent managers accountable for their own results while delivering a product with world-class accuracy that takes only seconds to manufacture. Too unusual to possibly be true? Well, they used to be. You're looking at a chart I made of the number of Google searches for “black swan.”
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Comments (4) See All Comments »
06-12-2009, 2:14 pm
re: [brackets in quote below added by me]

"That's the 2009 move on the 30-year Treasury yield. Making the leap from this unchartered flight (I'm getting the hang of this swan hyperbole), are a lot of fears that this is an
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06-12-2009, 2:25 pm
Remember the study that notes bonds are marginally a better return than stocks? Lots of noise out there and little to show for it going forward betting the straight up or down movements. Good article. I'm 40% common stocks with an emphasis on e
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06-13-2009, 4:13 pm
Great article, and I'm sure we will chop around for several months going forward.

However I do take issue with your claim that the yield on the 30 year Treasury hasn't "soared". Please take Friday's closing
Read More
06-15-2009, 7:57 am
I'm feeling now like I shouldn't invest in the stock market.

It would be interesting to compare treasuries and silver and gold to those stock market charts (compunded interest).

Good thing we had a war in 1940
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