A daylong sell-off carried stocks lower on Friday (Feb. 29), and on the week overall.
*****
Millions of people follow the major U.S. stock indexes each day. That simple fact duly observed, allow me to pose this question:
Why?
It may seem breathtakingly stupid for me to ask such a thing, given that the answer appears blatantly obvious:
People follow the stock indexes to gauge how their (or someone else's) investments are doing.
Right?
After all, half the households in America own equities via 401k accounts, mutual funds, IRAs, common stocks, etc., etc. Whatever the vehicle, people who own equities get in for "the long term." The "rational" advice of nearly all financial "experts" is for people to "buy and hold" in bull and bear markets. So that's exactly what investors do.
Right?
If you believe that, dear reader, then have I got a Biscayne Bay condo for you. The "experts" may well drivel on about how people should buy & hold, but any claim that most investors actually do so during bull and bear markets is complete rubbish.
More rubbish still is the assumption that the stock indexes reflect in any way the actual gains of equity investors themselves. Those two measures DO NOT CORRELATE.
The evidence for no such correlation is overwhelming:
"As this chart of the average holding period for a NYSE stock illustrates, investors actually turn up the hope and cling most tenaciously to their shares in bear markets .... So, the harder stocks fall, the tighter the grip of investors gets. This is a graphic depiction of Bob Prechter's phrase 'slope of hope' that keeps investors nervously eyeing, and then wistfully recalling their break-even levels as stocks continually break to new lows."
This quote is from the just-published March issue of The Elliott Wave Financial Forecast, and the chart it describes reflects data going back to the 1920s. I can safely say that once you see it, you'll never think about "buy and hold" investing in the same way again.
I can also safely say that this chart, and the entire March issue of The Elliott Wave Financial Forecast, can be on your computer screen within moments.