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The Use and Abuse of Bear Market History

By: Anthony Green

History never repeats exactly. When we look to history for indicators of what the future might bring, we need to take a little of this model and a little of that in order to create a new composite model that is unlike anything that has happened before. This lesson has been forgotten after 20 years of an almost unbroken bull market.

The possibility that we could get a protracted multi-year global bear market and recession is outside the comprehension of most investors. Most floor traders and fund managers today began their careers after 1980, so have no personal experience of the massive inflationary bear market of the 1970s. And when it began in 1966, many of them were not yet born.

Technology Foster Lazy thinking

Since the introduction of stock market software, it has become increasingly fashionable to compare todays stock market patterns with past models, without taking into consideration that what created those particular patterns were not just market related but caused by cultural and political factors as well.

Technology has made our lives infinitely more comfortable. But it is a double-edged sword. The more we rely on technology, the less we think for ourselves. And making informed judgments on the future of securities markets, based on an inner sense that comes from working with market data over many years, has become a lost art. Yet, there are so many factors that affect market behavior that cannot be reduced to a software package or a computer-generated predictive system.

In Europe, where capital preservation is of a higher priority than a quick profit, they are in the habit of taking a view. While they may trade the intermediate and short-term swings of the market, they do it within the context of a multi-year concept of where the world in general economic terms is heading. This creates a difference between the two continents in how bear markets are defined. In America, all bear markets tend to be given equal ranking, with no consideration to the bigger picture. But that limited view is not particularly helpful for the longer term investor, particularly in todays investment climate.

In the last 70 years, there have been two major occasions when taking a view enabled you to see a different, more accurate picture of events, than simply treating every uptrend in the market as a bull market, and every down-leg as a bear. These periods are 1929 to 1942, and from 1966 to 1982. Both periods were times when there were major economic and monetary problems that took well over a decade to resolve. Both periods were mirror images of what we have experienced between 1982 and 2000.

Article Source: http://www.articlegush.com

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