A quick scan of the market commentariat finds arguments that the living will envy the dead at one extreme to:
at the other.
However, the thing to remember about markets is: You don't have to do anything.
Here's a repost of a December 13, 2013 post, "Intertemporal Arbitrage: "Winning Big by Playing Long-Term Trends" (CNI; PNR)":
From our December 3 post "UPDATED--The Economist On How the Commodity Quants Lost It":
I am having great difficulty with the idea that hedge funds couldn't find a way to make money, more after the jump....
...The bolded bit points up one of the failures of the fund managers.
They get paid to figure out the intertemporal arbitrage, a fancy way of saying the task at hand is to understand the time period that gives the fund the greatest advantage versus the market.
The classic example is the individual investor realizing that he can't compete with HFT and looking at longer than nanosecond time periods. This opens up the possibility of not just not-competing with the traders with the lowest latency but of taking advantage of mispricings caused by their behavior. This is exemplified by one of Buffett's baseball metaphors (he has quite a few):
In investments, there's no such thing as a called strike. You can stand there at the plate and the pitcher can throw a ball right down the middle; and if it's General Motors at 47 and you don't know enough to decide on General Motors at 47, you let it go right on by and no one's going to call a strike. The only way you can have a strike is to swing and miss.The point is, you don't have to be at the market every second You are afforded the luxury of just waiting for the perfect pitch.
Now for a fund manager it get's tricky writing the quarterly report and saying "We didn't do much in Q3, we're waiting for Mr. Market to give us the high hanging curve ball" but if you've been honest with the investors that the tactic you've pulled from the toolbox is akin to the military's hurry-up-and-wait sense of time it is doable.
As a side note anyone who considers a move that is measured in weeks to be a trend is nuts. A trend is John Templeton going into the Japanese markets at 2 times earnings and catching a 40-fold move 1965-1989....
And the headline? It's the Rock Man talking to Oblio in the Land of Point.
He first showed up on our little blog in October 2008:
"The Rock Man said, "Say, babe, there ain't nothing pointless about this gig. The thing is you see what you want to see and you hear what you want to hear. You dig? Did you ever see Paris?""No."
"Did you ever see New Deli?"
"No."
"Well, that's it. You see what you want to see and you hear what you want to hear." And with that the Rock Man fell soundly asleep...
—from Harry Nilsson's The Point!
For our younger readers October 2008 was a time of great tumult in the markets.
So much so that for months after the 50%+ collapse had halted I referred to the period September 2008 - March 2009 as "The recent unpleasantness" so as not to trigger flashbacks and PTSD among the survivors.
