Investing Diary

Here we are at the end of March and the market is retesting the correction lows. It will be interesting to see if the market goes down further. If it does, it will most likely trigger a lot of sell signals for the trend followers, Dow theorists, etc.

Most of the economic indicators that I follow are available for this month. The only leading economic indicator that I see in the red is the rising oil price. But oil prices have been so weak, that hardly seems a concern. Also notable, consumer sentiment is reportedly at a 14 year high. I'm guessing that is a good thing for the short term, but a contrarian indicator for the longer term. As a side note, Ed Yardeni has a new book out that is getting good reviews. I may have to get that.

This is my inaugural post for my new investing diary. I've been keeping this diary in a text file on my hard drive, but it was getting rather long and unruly. I thought it might be better organized in a private blog. Anyway, here it is.  So I was playing around with the perfcharts on stockcharts.com and I discovered something startling. Bond returns have beaten the S&P 500 since the height of the dot com bubble in the year 2000. That's 18 years! Now, I don't know if that includes dividends, but nevertheless, I find that statistic astonishing. The perfchart for a diversified bond fund shows a return since 2000 of approximately 85%. That translates to approximately 3.5% a year, not adjusted for inflation; while the return for stocks was even less. Now, many will argue that we are at the height of a current bond bubble and that bond out-performance is not likely to last. But many would have made that same argument years ago. I also expected bonds to tank a long time ag...