In the era of real-time news, Twitter, high frequency trading and “what have you done for me lately”, I think it’s kind of nice that the stock market has become “metaboring”. At least that’s what Goldman Sachs says of the current market environment:
“Metaboring: it’s getting boring to make the comment that equities are again boring. Or maybe that’s called boring-squared. Here’s to hoping tomorrow is boring-cubed. To reinforce the point that nothing much is moving, our US portfolio strategy team has 20 ‘thematic baskets’ (that I can see on BBG anyways), and not a single one moved more than 1% today. None of the 8 ‘macro baskets’ moved more than 50bps.”
I remember back in 2004-2007 when everything was calm and quiet. There was no persistent crisis, no perpetual fear mongering, no fiscal cliff around the corner, etc. The market just wasn’t very sexy (I guess stability really does create instability, huh?). It was what a stock market should be. A place where investors can buy into the secondary market, own a piece of corporate America and not have to stop their day job to make sure their life’s savings isn’t getting sucked down the tubes by someone at Knight Capital or some politician in Europe. In a perfect world, markets are supremely boring to the point where you don’t even need to worry about them more than a few times a year. But that’s not the world we live in today. We live in a world where you’re convinced that churning your account and minding every market movement is in your best interest. More often than not, it’s in the best interest of Wall Street or the media and no one else. Anyhow, before this turns into a rant…here’s to hoping for more “metaboring”. But don’t bet on it….
Mr. Roche is the Founder and Chief Investment Officer of Discipline Funds.Discipline Funds is a low fee financial advisory firm with a focus on helping people be more disciplined with their finances.
He is also the author of Pragmatic Capitalism: What Every Investor Needs to Understand About Money and Finance, Understanding the Modern Monetary System and Understanding Modern Portfolio Construction.
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