[OT] CAPE ratio, P/S ratio, yield curve, ISM PMI, Conf board LEI

No I've been taking money out of the market. You forgot to mention trillions of treasuries and mortgage backed securities the fed bought during the crisis that still needs to be unwound.

Same. Peter Schiff actually made some good points about gold and gold mining stocks: youtu.be might add some of that.

FTS, anything you think you know about what is offered on the financial markets is all after the fact information. It has ZERO predictive power. It is just a rationalization for why the current prices are what they are.

SJG

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@FTS- I watched most of the Peter Schiff video and I think he's a smart guy. I remember Schiff and Shiller were predicting a collapse in the housing market well before it actually happened.

My (admittedly naive) interpretation of QE is that it successfully reduced interest rates and caused people to pile into stocks. There's something like $4 trillion of QE still on the Fed books and the unwinding, I would think, would depress the stock market. And the implications for gold and mining stocks are also obvious. I do have some gold stocks -- but I'm too chicken-shit to have much.

Another macro trend is that boomers are going to be retiring and cashing in their stocks which, I would think, would also depress the market. And we've already discussed that the market is simply over valued if you look at the CAPE.

I follow Shiller on Twitter (respect him enormously) and he recently gave this interview at Davos: youtube.com

His latest book is about how viral stories influence the stock market and he brings up examples from the 2008 downturn, to Bitcoin, to Donald Trump. You can be the greatest mathematician and try your best to predict the markets -- but a lot of stock market behavior is driven by irrational human behavior and stories that go viral. I didn't post this because of his Bitcoin example and it's not meant to contradict anything you've posted.

As Shiller points out, Trump is an absolute master of manipulating the media and coming up with horseshit stories that capture the imagination or ordinary people and that go viral. Trump has a very intuitive, visceral, understanding of human behavior. Social media, Fox, etc...makes things even worse.

@Random, yes, many believe the unwinding of the Fed's balance sheet is part of the cause for the big sell off around Christmas time of 2018. And I also saw the interview Robert Shiller did at Davos, it was pretty good. He also did an hour-long interview a few months ago, I think, hosted by Jeff Gundlach's firm. He actually mentioned Bitcoin like 3 times within the first 20 minutes lol, talking about his Narrative Economics book. The interviewers kinda joked with the audience, whispering about his Bitcoin position, "he's long."

You guys have data about our economy. But this does not tell anyone anything about what will happen with financial markets.

If there was some way to know that the price of an issue would be different than it is today, then it would already be at that new price right now.

What you have time to collect and do computer analysis on is far less than what the mangers of the insurance, hedge, and retirement funds can do. It is their trades which determine the current pricing. The information you are collecting is only an attempt to rationalize current pricing.

SJG

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