The Overpriced Market: It's hard to find anything worth buying

1.  Stocks in the market had enjoyed a great rise to a year high and optimism abounded.
2.  In the festive atmosphere that surrounded a recent 300 points in three weeks, I was the most depressed person.
3.  I am always more depressed by an overpriced market in which many stocks are hitting new highs every day than by a beaten-down market in a recession.
4.  Recessions, I figure, will always end sooner or later.
5.  In a beaten-down market there are bargains everywhere you look.
6.  But in an overpriced market, it's hard to find anything worth buying.
7.  The devoted stockpicker is happier when the market drops 300 points than when it rises the same amount.
8.  Many of the larger stocks had risen in price to the point that they'd strayed far above their earning lines.  This was a bad sign.
9.  Stocks that are priced higher than their earnings lines have a regular habit of moving sideways (a.k.a. taking a breather) or falling in price until they are brought back to more reasonable valuations.
10.  A glance at these charts led me to suspect that the much-ballyhooed growth stocks this year would do nothing or go sideways in the next year, even in a good market.
11.  In a bad market, they could suffer 30% declines.  
12.  I was more worried about the growth stocks.
13.  There's no quicker way to tell if a large growth stock is overvalued, undervalued, or fairly priced than by looking at  a chart book.
14.  Buy shares when the stock price is at or below the earnings line, and not when the price line diverges into the danger zone, way above the earnings line.
15. The market overall had also reached very pricey levels relative to book value, earnings and other common measures, but many of the smaller stocks had not.
16.  Annual tax selling by disheartened investors at the end of the year drives the prices of smaller issues to pathetic lows.
17.  You could make a nice living buying stocks from the low list in November and December during the tax-selling period and then holding them through January, when the prices always seem to rebound.
18.  This January effect, is especially powerful with smaller companies., which over the last 60 years have risen 6.86% in price in that one month, while stocks in general have risen only 1.6%.
19.  Don't pick a new and different company just to give yourself another quote to look up.  You'll end up with too many stocks and you won't remember why you bought any of them.
20.  Getting involved with a manageable number of companies and confining your buying and selling to these is not a bad strategy.  
21.  Once you have bought a stock, presumably you have learned something about the industry and the company's place within it, how it behaves in recessions, what factors affect the earnings, etc.
22.  Inevitably, some gloomy scenario will cause a general retreat in the stock market, your old favourites will once again become bargains, and you can add to your investment.
23.  The more common practice of buying, selling, and forgetting a long string of companies is not likely to succeed.  Yet many investors continue to do this.
24.  They want to put their old stocks out of their minds, because an old stock evokes a painful memory.
25.  If they didn't lose money on it by selling too late, then they lost money on it by selling too soon.  Either way, it's something to forget.
26.  With a stock you once owned, especially one that's gone up since you sold it, it's human nature to avoid looking at the quote on the business page, the way you might sneak around the aisle to avoid meeting an old flame in a supermarket.
27.  I know people who read the stock tables with their fingers over their eyes, to protect themselves from the emotional shock of seeing that their sold stock has doubled since they sold it.
28.  People have to train themselves to overcome this phobia.
29.  I am forced to get involved with stocks I have owned before, because otherwise there'd be nothing left to buy.
30.  Along the way, I have also learned to think of investments not as disconnected events, but as continuing sagas, which need to be rechecked from time to time for new twists and turns in the plots.
31.  Unless a company goes bankrupt, the story is never over.
32.  A stock you might have owned 10 years ago, or 2 years ago, may be worth buying again.
33.  To keep up with the old favourites, I carry a notebook, in which I record important details from the quarterly and annual reports, plus the reasons that I bought or sold each stock the last time around.
34.  On the way to the office or at home late at night, I thumb through these notebooks, as other people thumb through love letters found in the attic.


Peter Lynch
Beating the Street

Why the Market Is Irrational and What You Can Do About It

http://finance.yahoo.com/blogs/breakout/harvard-teach-investing-111707627.html

3 Stages of a Bull Market and 3 Stages of a Bear Market

2011 Value Investing Congress Notes
http://www.scribd.com/doc/54958483/2011-Value-Investing-Congress-Notes

The swing of the pendulum 
o Constantly going between greed and fear, risk tolerance and risk aversion, and optimism and pessimism
o In theory, the pendulum should be at the happy medium

 On average it is in the middle 
 But it spends little time there
 Excesses constitute the errors of herd behavior

 3 stages of a bull market 
 Few people feel things are getting better
 Most people realize improvement is taking place
 Everyone thinks things will get better forever
 "What the wise man does in the beginning, the fool does in the end."
o The last buyer pays the price 

 3 stages of a bear market 
 Few people realize that things are overpriced and dangerous
 Most people see the decline is underway
 Everyone believes that things will get worse forever
o Great opportunity to buy if we can behave counter-cyclically - Importance of being a contrarian.



Ben Claremon: The Inoculated Investor http://inoculatedinvestor.blogspot.com/  

How to Identify Stock Bull Market Tops

Many Symptoms occur When Bull Market is at Major Top .These are given below

1. Yearly High of Stock Index much higher than Previous year’s High

2. Now of Shares hitting new High as percentage of Total Shares Climbs new peak

3. Very Fast upsurge in Stock prices and indices

4. Near unanimous view of Experts that This is Start of biggest bull in History

5. General Magazines Which Do not Care About Stock Markets in Normal time, puts bull run in Cover Story

6.New Theories to justify high prices, in 2008 we had the Decoupling Stheory

7. A Sea of New Investors enter the Stock market with Dreams of instant Rich

8.Market Stops reacting to Good News


http://nse2rich.com/how-to-identify-stock-bull-market-tops-are-sensex-nifty-near-the-top/

So these were the Symptoms.

Are we at Top of 2010 now or is This Bull market still Alive?

Are We are Still Quite Far From Bull market top?

What will be your decision?

What are your actions: staying invested, rebalancing or divesting partially or divesting totally?

But then you will be timing the market, a dangerous strategy too!

An explanation on what are 'peaks' in a bull market

Thursday August 6, 2009
An explanation on what are 'peaks' in a bull market



IS it time to bail out of the China and Hong Kong stock markets? Are they too frothy already? iCapital says “not by a long shot”.

For one, investor sentiment is still extremely weak and nervous, despite the rally seen in numerous stock markets.

After rising 100% in nine months, the Shanghai Composite index this week plunged 5% in a single day, making investors all nervous and worried that the Chinese government is about to start tightening and cause a hard landing. This is how fragile the current sentiment is.

Peaks in bull markets are made when the markets are unable to continue rising even in the face of continuing positive fundamental news.

Now the situation is such that investors keep buying and worrying that the fundamentals do not improve or would not sustain.

Second, while bank lending in China has been surging, the broad Chinese economy is still not on a sound broad recovery footing. The Chinese government knows that bank loans cannot keep expanding at the current rate.

The leaders and policymakers know that they are navigating a very difficult situation. Too loose a monetary policy for too long a period, China may have an asset bubble in equity and property prices. Too tight a policy too early, one may prematurely short-circuit the current recovery momentum.


China recognises this delicate situation and is also very aware that foreign parties know the fragile state China is in and are ever ready to exploit this to destabilise China.

However, the leaders and policymakers have plenty of experience in handling such types of tight rope situations.

Unknown to most people, China’s unemployment rate has been rising for the last 25-30 years (see chart), thanks to the endless and relentless restructuring of the Chinese economy.

Millions of workers have been retrenched as state-owned enterprises and other organisations restructured. Even the People’s Liberation Army had to downsize.

In view of the restructuring process, the leaders are extremely sensitive to the labour market conditions and are very experienced in handling such delicate affairs. For now, the external demand for China’s products remains weak.

The reliance on domestic sources of growth is of paramount importance. And this will continue to be the case until convincing signs appear that it is time to cool things down.

Many analysts caution on the present market rally, saying that it is all liquidity driven. Meanwhile, the rest of the world is showing more signs of recovery.

Soon, it will be green fields everywhere. When this happens, the depressed earnings will surge and the equity market valuation will look less expensive then.

The same applies to the Hong Kong stock market. Even the initial public offering market is just beginning its frenzied phase.

Even though the Hang Seng index has rallied strongly since its bottom in October 2008, the bull market is still young. No bull market has died at such a young age.

http://biz.thestar.com.my/news/story.asp?file=/2009/8/6/business/4461929&sec=business



Related:

Bubble Trouble
http://myinvestingnotes.blogspot.com/2009/06/bubble-trouble.html

Bubbles and bear markets are two separate and distinct things. Investors truly need to understand the differences. You need to understand which strategy to apply when, and not use a hammer when you need a screwdriver. Once you see the straightforward differences, you will know what to do.