Friday, July 3, 2009

Down is Bad


“The future is never clear, and you pay a very high price in the stock market for a cheery consensus. Uncertainty is the friend of the buyer of long-term values.”
Warren Buffett


I'm not sure the ugly June jobs number was enough to torpedo the market as it happened Friday, but the data was clearly worse than expected. If you like pictures, you can see at left that the 5th consecutive month of improvement did not occur.


If the recovery were guaranteed and smooth, stocks would be very expensive. It isn't and they aren't. Some annuities are, though, if you're into that kind of thing.


Don't forget that bonds have outperformed stocks over the last 30 or 40 years. Trust me on that - I'm not going digging for the numbers. That state of affairs is very unlikely to be the case over the next 30.


****


Twitter is mostly useless as far as I can tell, unless you worship someone and want to know there whereabouts and careabouts every minute of the day, or as often as they are willing to share. It's funny that they (Twitter) have Microsoft and Facebook scrambling to keep up.


The fact that Twitter is instant almost guarantees that thoughtfulness, research and wisdom are absent, or at least an afterthought. Good summary at the Financial Times. More on this later.

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