From the Slope of Hope: Let's take a step back - -- a few thousand steps back, actually - - and drink in a very long view of the stock market. We'll use the S&P 500 as our observed entity. Here it is below, spanning several decades, with three major tops tinted.
Authored by Adam Taggart via PeakProsperity.com,
Have you moved a material percentage of your financial portfolio to cash? Have you become so concerned about the meteoric ramp upwards in asset prices that you find it wiser instead to move to the sidelines, build "dry powder", and wait to re-enter the markets at saner valuations?
If so, you have my sympathies.
We spend a lot of time talking about the public pension crisis because, well, it's a massive $5 - $8 trillion dollar overhang on the economy and one which will undoubtedly result in some heartache for investors at some point in the future. Unfortunately, there are some problems that are too large for even U.S. taxpayers to fix and, with an underfunding of $52,000 (mid-point) per household, somehow we suspect this is one of them.
In the battle between "old" (bricks and mortar) and "new" (online) retail, few will survive although according to the market, the winner couldn't be more clear.
Complacent: Contented to a fault; self-satisfied - The American Heritage Dictionary
Three weeks after the volatility-obsessed Deutsche Bank derivatives expert Aleksandar Kocic went so far as to not only qualify what he said was pervasive market complacency, but to also quantify it, and observe the exact moment when the market stopped caring and reacting to macro developments, some time in 2012...
... Canaccord Genuity's Brian Reynolds is out with a new report that takes conventional wisdom about prevailing market sentiment and flips it on its head.