World Indices Roundup 2019

Arhhhhh the old investment plan, yes thanks to you I spent many days putting it together and I'm pretty happy with it. Still some fine tuning.

I have a stack of dividends coming in this month, so yes I will be deploying some cash for a few purchases as part of my total return investing strategy

 

Yeah that reminds me, one day I should put together a plan for myself.

 

I think with your enlightenment of investing, your financial plan will be lessons learnt along your rewarding financial journey.

 

So I’m not the only one here just wingin’ it?

 

He he. Yes, as per Thornhill along the lines of “do what I say, not what I do”.

 

Provided I can remember them at my age.

 

I would not be doing anything at this time.
The time to get in has long passed and the time to light up if you did has also imo.

Unless it goes down to 4k again it's just a wait n see imo.

 

This has come up a few times before - asx hasn't even surpassed pre-gfc highs. From the discussion back then, it seemed that comparing US and AUS indices is not necessarily a like for like comparison.

I.e. shouldn't you be comparing total returns here, using an accumulation index?

The idea being AUS companies have a higher payout ratio, therefore the share price is a smaller proportion of the total return.

I'm thinking out loud here, I'm just not sure how we translate it into "euphoria"? Should we take into account total returns, not just share price?

 

I don’t think price levels a decade ago or any time are necessarily helpful in assessing whether we’re overvalued today.

And you’re right when comparing markets previous performance that total return is the best measure to use.

Think @Nodrog is probably saying that for all the talk about the markets run, prices haven’t hit a record high yet.

Price is an important measure of sentiment because it tells us how much people are willing to pay for a dollar of earnings.

Makes sense (to me) to look at PE ratio and level of interest rates to see if current market is reasonable or not. Doesn’t look all that expensive by that measure. More so when considering rates don’t look like going up for a long while.

That’s obviously not to say the market can’t fall a long way at any time!

So we’re back to square one - nobody knows what’s going to happen

 

Exactly, dollar cost average is your friend, well, my friend anyway!

 

XJO top, are we there yet? It may well be in or very soon. If it's not, watch 24 July or thereabouts. Siri told me this. Then comes weeks/months of decline.

 

NSFW: How To Make Siri Curse Like A Sailor

Possibly a better use for Siri

 

Hope you’re right! Would love to top up at much lower prices.

 

While I myself have recently changed my portfolio allocation to very conservative, with mostly cash and fixed interest, I'm leaning towards your point.

The worst crashes are preceded by significant exuberance yet I'm not sensing that this time. While the market is inching up, there's a lot of negative mainstream reporting, the taxi drivers and fruit shop vendors aren't telling me to buy shares, and most funds are relatively highly weighted in cash.

I once read about the Greater Fool theory. The theory goes that the market is sure to go down once the greatest fool has bought and there is no greater fool left to sell to. Basically that for the market to keep going up, there needs to be sellers and buyers. If the market has raced up because all the buyers have become owners, then there's no more buyers left and all the owners are potential sellers. The market plummets when those owners need, or desperately want, to sell.

So while I expect some short term weakness as buyers willing to pay high prices dry up, there are so many potential buyers - fund managers - sitting on cash waiting to buy, that I expect that a small to reasonable correction will be enough to turn them quickly into buyers and provide a reasonably stable support from further falls. Unless of course there is some other unexpected shock to the market.

 

If at 10am this morning there was (suddenly) a 20% sale on 'all stock' I would think it was Christmas already! As Tony barber used to say, "let's go shopping"

 

Alternatively:

 

I didn't know he was on the ABC or ArtSound.

 

I honestly didn't know he was on local radio.

Apologies folks for the total thread drift. A bad habit of mine and one which I'm not attempting to overcome.