Authored by Lance Roberts via RealInvestmentAdvice.com,
Over the years, I have regularly addressed the psychological and emotional pitfalls which ultimately lead individual investors to poor outcomes. The internet is regularly littered with a stream of articles promoting the ideas of “dollar cost averaging,” “buy and hold” investing, and “passive indexing” as the solution to achieving your financial dreams.
Emerging Markets (EEM) has done well this year, gaining over twice as much as the S&P 500 (17% -vs- 7%). These gains have Emerging markets facing resistance dating back to the highs in 2008 and a couple of other important resistance lines in the chart below.
While the hedge fund community has once again failed to take advantage of what so many predicted would be a new "golden age" for the 2 and 20 crowd as a result of a collapse in pairwise correlations, largely as a result of short stocks squeezing higher and hurting performance, it has been a different story for the "long only" mutual fund group, which according to a new analysis by Bank of America enjoyed its best quarter and 1H half in eight years, specifically "over half (54%) of large cap fund managers beat their benchmarks in the first half of the year- for the first time since 2
S&P futures are sliding this morning, down 0.4% and tracking the accelerating decline in European and Asian stocks, driven by a move higher in global interest rates, which started with Japanese 10Y yields rising to 0.1% for the first time since February, but mostly Bund yields which spiked after tripping stops, and jumped as high as 0.53% for the first time since early 2016. Oil climbs, dollar and gold slide. Economic data include initial jobless claims, trade balance, Markit PMI readings.
Over the last few years, as nervous investors worried about a market that has risen to record highs on trillions in central bank liquidity, and seeking some particular market product to which they could transfer their concerns and fears, ETFs quickly emerged as the current generations' "CDO" - the product that will accelerate the next crash when the BTFD mentality that has defined the market for the past 8 years, finally ends as central bankers pull the rug from under an entire generation of traders.