02 March 2009

Longing for the days of "Dow 36,000"

Anybody remember the 'classic' book Dow 36,000 by Glassman, Hassett and Hassett? Available very cheap on the marketplace at amazon.com these days...

Basically the book was the high water mark of the eyewash that people were touting around 10 years ago saying that we were in a new technological 'golden age' and stock indices would rise by 10% a year in perpetuity, or whatever.

It's easy now, of course, to say that this is a load of eyewash. Not so easy when stock indices are rising by 10% a year and you're being labelled a contrarian for saying that it's a bubble and it might not last.

It's just the same as the poor sods who are saying now that wait a minute, the Dow is below 7,000, and we might be headed for 3,600 rather than 36,000, but then again we might be about to turn a corner. When the market is in 'herd behaviour' mode (which seems to be pretty much all the time except at the exact point there's a crash), nobody wants to know that things might be slightly more complex.

Your best option for long term investment really is what the folks at fool.com have been telling you for years: get a tracker fund, make sure the annual management charges are as low as possible, and just invest regularly. Low maintenance, low cost. The only thing whizzbang active fund managers are good at is creaming off extra charges at your expense.

Anyway I intend to get hold of a copy of Dow 36,000 as I suspect in the light of current events it will read like a comedy classic. (Very black humour, of course...) with apologies to anybody out there who's lost their shirt on the stock market. But you sure as shit won't do it again. (Or will you? Because that's what they said after the 2000 'dot com' crash...:-()

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