Springmom said:
As far as the original post goes (we DO remember the original post, right?? ) ISTM that he's making some odd assumptions. Mind you, I've not read the book, so I'm going on slim data here, but the presumption that a market upturn predates an upswing in military/social fortunes doesn't exactly equate with "therefore we're fixin' to have SHTF". I don't get the connection.
Springmom he wasn't talking about various arbitrary points, he did specifically mention record highs and lows. That's pretty definite, if accurate. The connection was record high=bad times coming, record low=good times coming. The problem is that it cannot be used as a predictive tool, because you don't KNOW you've reached the bottom, until far later when you look back.
I don't believe it means that Midway was won because the stock market said so, or that the market even predicted it. If Midway had been lost surely the market could have found a new low. But due to the speculative nature of investing it's rather logical that there would be correlations, and it could seem prescient because people are necessarily predicting outcomes when investing. But some people were betting it would go lower, and some were betting it would go higher.
Remember, Capital is Mobile, Sensitive, and Scarce. It gravitates towards stability.
Things are bad, really bad. Prices are at an all-time low. You level of risk acceptance is such that you say, "What the hell, things can't get much worse than this." and you start buying. Someone else at that same moment says, "Hell, things can only get worse." and sells to you. If things get better - then you are psychic. You predicted the future, you have a graph to prove it, you bought and a month later your country won a crucial battle. If things get worse, then the other guy has a graph to prove he predicted the future.
At least that's my take, feel free to point out flaws.