I must admit, being a bear on the Street these days is some kind of hard business.
Because while the bears have continued to insist that the glass is half full and could shatter into a million pieces at any moment, the markets have only gone higher.
So here we all sit, wildly waving our arms from a lonely but noisy island called Contrarianism. It’s a small place these days, far from shore, where the doom-and-gloom crowd trades scary stories about depression, contagion, and an imminent correction.
Meanwhile, the bulls taunt us from the opposite shore with late-night parties and the sounds of popping champagne corks.
But as they say, "that’s the market."
After all, for every buyer who thinks the market is going higher, there is a seller who is thinks it has be headed lower.
And at the end of the day, it is Mr. Market who decides who is right and who is wrong.
Meanwhile, in places far removed from Wall and Broad, the American consumer taps out a beat in tones the bulls would rather ignore. Suddenly, it seems, frugality is all the rage.
In fact, even Wal-Mart has the felt the pinch; the nation’s biggest retailer reported an unexpected 1.2% drop in same-store-sales last week, badly missing the previous guidance of up 3%.
That tends to be a problem when 70% of U.S. GDP rides on their beaten down wallets, which — if you take the time to listen to them — is what the bears have been screaming about all along. That and rising unemployment.
Of course, these are all things that we’ve been talking about for some time now, which made us chuckle when we came across this cartoon last week.
In a way, it kind of sums it all up for me — although the bulls would argue otherwise:
So, as the summer begins to fade, here’s a look at the investment stories of the week — both bullish and bearish.
Your bargain-hunting analyst,
Steve Christ, Investment Director
The Wealth Advisory
P.S. In case you’ve missed any of the recent top stories from Wealth Daily and our sister publications, we’ve included them here:
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