I think I am now a permabear.
The "recovery" from the 2008 crash that people pride themselves for riding out has been fueled by debt with little real investment for future return. A lot of the market recovery is companies buying their own stock back (using borrowed funds). IBM has to borrow just to pay their dividend.
The national debt has doubled in just the last 10 years, again with none of it invested in any infrastructure thats going to help future growth to pay for that debt.
10 years post-crash and the market still requires near 0 interest rates? thats not a recovery thats being on life support.
Then there are central banks purchasing stocks directly... the Swiss central bank owns 90B of individual company stocks. BOJ is the largest shareholder in 40% of Japans listed companies and Bloomberg says the BOJ owns 75% of Japans ETF market.
Then there are those who chide on "market timing"... what else is old style value investing "buy low, sell high" other than market timing? Blind buy-and-hold is no more than wishful thinking that what worked yesterday will still work tomorrow.
HFTs (insider trading done by getting information faster than anybody else) front runs all your trades. Market liquidity is an algorithmic illusion and nobody knows what those algos are going to do in the next pinch.
The more I try to do old style value investing the more the market looks like a casino. Place your bets and spin the wheel.
I'm so far over the edge I'm starting to distrust the Stable Value fund in my 401K as it is mostly insurance company wrap contracts. I'm going to take 1/2 of it off the table, roll it into an IRA and just CD it.
Whew. OK. Time to crawl back under my rock.