"I had predicted the actual meltdown for September of 2015, but I guess this is pretty close. I wonder how this will affect my life, if at all."
If you predicted it, then it should at least make you rich? :)
If you predicted it, then it should at least make you rich? :)
This cognitive fallacy of "I knew" and "I was saying it long ago" etc... really irks me.
Especially in something like stocks you are 100% right, put your money where your mouth is and spare us the story of your grand predictive prowesses.
I profited from the bubble quite well, decided the top had been hit when things got really wonky and got out of the market in 2007. I was a year early, but I'm not complaining.
It's not a fallacy, you can do it, if you understand economics. The problem is, most people involved in stocks are more interested in technical analysis and tea reading than fundamentals of economics.
It's the fundamentals of economics that drive "black swan" events.
From 2001-2007 I constantly saw people claim there was no bubble, I constantly saw people say things like the economy is good and healthy. I constantly saw people pretend like the fed wasn't blowing up a balloon. Article after article was published spinning tales to pretend like up was down and down was up.
And then in 2008 when it popped, I constantly saw people claim there was no way to see it coming. I saw it blamed on Wall Street. And since then I've seen article after article published to misdirect and mislead about what was going on, saying up was down and down was up, to service the narrative.
The key indicator of a science is the ability to make predictions... yet the "dismal science" of economics is portrayed by politicians as incapable of saying anything, because they use it to pitch self serving narratives.
But the reality is, good economics has predicted every major crash, and its reasons. You can't necessarily know the timing-- I was off by a year, and I have no clue when the next one is coming.
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I see I've been slow banned and am getting brigade downvoted across all of my comments. This harassment is typical on hacker news when you think for yourself and don't tow the party line. Jesus, what draconian filter bubble. That's fine, my time here was largely wasted anyway.
Here's the comment I was going to make below, but now am not allowed to:
I've been slow banned so I expect a hell ban is coming, I don't know why, but I guess its because I'm not on the praising obama bandwagon. So this may be my last post, if I'm ever able to post it.
Yes, if I'd just stayed in with everything for 6 months or a year I would have been worse off. I was pretty close to the top, in what I was investing in. I did sense that the market got weird- the response was not what it should have been based on the macro events. When things stopped making sense, I got out...
If I hadn't gotten out at all I would have lost a lot of money - whether you measure to 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015.
Those investments were plays on the bubble... not investments that make sense after the bubble.
It's difficult to do long horizon investing when the market is so manipulated- by the government and by the messed up regulation-inhibited outdated exchanges. But you can know the fundamentals.
The problem is, a lot of people emotionally don't want to face reality, and a lot more people get rich selling them fantasy.
No, the US economy is not doing well. Hell, the US government can't even sell bonds, it's selling them to itself with the Fed fabricating money to buy them.
a) what would have happened had you stayed in for an extra month? An extra 6 months? The full year?
b) what would have happened if you hadn't gotten out at all?
The only reason I ask, is that most of the studies I've seen show that being able to predict macro level shifts in the market up to and including within 1 year time frames are largely less valuable than people would think. Especially for people doing long horizon investing.
Don't kick yourself for getting out a year early. It's way better than half a year too late.
However:
> the US government can't even sell bonds, it's selling them to itself with the Fed fabricating money to buy them.
That part is over, and has been for months. And yet US bond prices are still only at 2%. I've been watching that number pretty closely - US bond auctions failing would be a huge red light for me. But even without the Fed as a buyer, the US government is having very little trouble selling bonds at top prices.
Maybe you're being down-voted because you're just a guy on the internet, bragging about how you saw it coming (7 years in advance!), timed it perfectly, made a bunch of money, and are now lecturing us on how it's "easy"...without a shred of evidence?
More or less, he had said 'I felt it was unhealthy 7 years in advance'. The actual 'prediction' was only a year or two from the event in question; 'the market didn't make sense' and reacting to that.
I'm not going to claim that I have any deep technical knowledge of the stock market, but the writing has been on the wall for quite a while.
Besides, it wasn't just this commenter who predicted it. Many have before. In fact, even the laypress TV news like 60-Minutes have pointed out issues that will cause major growing pains to China. Run a Google search, click "Search Tools", and query the date range from the beginning of last year to end of Spring this year.
When it actually happens (in both cases), there will be some subset of people whose published prediction is close to or even exactly matches the date when it finally did happen, and those people will gloat about it.
But for every one of those people there are thousands, possibly millions or more others whose prediction dates came and went with no catastrophe occurring. Given the huge number of people who publish their predictions, then, we have to ask which of these is more likely:
1. The people who got the date right -- either exact, or within a certain small window of the actual date -- had some genuinely deep insight missed by others, which allowed them and only them to make a correct prediction, or
2. Given a large enough segment of people making predictions, some subset of them will have their predicted date match the actual date purely by chance. For example, predicting market trends five years out only gives five years in which something can happen, or twenty quarters, or sixty months, or 260 weeks, or 1,826 days to peg your predictions onto. If the number of people making predictions is large enough, all dates are likely be covered by at least one prediction.
It's more of a morbid curiosity for me.
It's easy to say "I saw it coming!" after it's happened. But if you saw it coming, why didn't you do something to take advantage of the situation (given that doing something about it is pretty much impossible)?