Hacker News Reader

Comment by Moodles | Hacker News Reader

I was expecting to see discussions of something like a yield curve in this article, not the fashion sense of CEOs...

Market timing is pretty much impossible for most people. So many people said we’re heading for a crash 3, 4, 5 years ago. They lost out on so many gains. We might crash tomorrow, or we might crash in 5 years. Nobody knows for sure. Market timing based on articles like this is a fool’s game.

I’d really love these people who constantly predict the crash to also predict when the market will pick up, but of course they never do. They just keep predicting a crash and eventually get lucky. And we only remember the correct predictions. Why don’t they put their money where their mouth is and actually show us all that they’re investing according to their predictions as well...

View on HN

Exactly, unless the author of the article reveals his positions in the market it’s hard to take seriously.

Not saying I disagree about the possibility of a bubble - but timeframes and magnitude matter - and talk is cheap. A public investment portfolio or asset allocation strategy is worth a 1000 Medium posts.

Otherwise the prediction in the article amounts to ‘something will crash... at some point’. It’s really that generic.

In the current late stage of a cheap debt infused bull market it appears to be more sane to predict a crash and hence discourage people form investing in it altogether (or at least be extremely cautious) rather than speculating on where exactly the market top will occur.

If you miss the timing of the crash all of these gains will have disappeared anyway. Downturns often happen too fast for normal people to react to in time to save their gains.

It's most likely time to buy again directly after a crash or significant pullback has happened and valuations have come down to a more rational level.

No one can predict a market under the current circumstances (federal reserves keeping rates artificially low, pumping new funny money into the market over a period of 5-10 years).

How is under-target inflation for a decade artificially low rates?

Well, look at where the money has gone. It's now in the stock market and in real estate. Inflation is there, it just didn't trickle down into the CPI basket (yet).

Because it is not normal to have such a low yield on Guilts around 1% for ten year in the UK

> In the current late stage of a cheap debt infused bull market it appears to be more sane to predict a crash and hence discourage people form investing in it altogether (or at least be extremely cautious) rather than speculating on where exactly the market top will occur.

People were making the same argument in 2012.

And they were most likely right in 2012.

Market timing may be impossible, you can still observe that it's getting irrational.

Observe crypto currencies at the peak, people were talking nonsense that was never going to be true, and it was quite obviously a bubble. That irrationality just makes it harder to predict when the crash will come.

Yield curve is a somewhat rational measure, bubbles aren't rational (from a financial perspective).

BTW I was given 0.01 of these new fangled bitcoin years ago and promptly forgot about it. I sold in October before the crash. I make no claims to be any kind of investing expert, but I assume that counts as putting my money where my mouth is.

It's not "market timing" to acknowledge that the longer we go without a crash the more likely that crash is to occur given the length of our current cycle (all other economic or fashion indicators aside). You shouldn't base your economic outlook based on "articles like this", but you should certainly consider the history of our boom/bust economy and how late we are in the cycle.

brings to mind the saying, "a broken clock is correct twice in a day"

Reply on news.ycombinator.com