If you were to Google “stock market volatility”, you would find a wide range of observations, conversations, reports, link alternatif hoki222, recipes, critiques, predictions, alarms, and causal confusion. Books have been written; indices and measuring tools have been created; rationales and conclusions have been proffered. Yet, the volatility remains.
Statisticians, economists, regulators, politicians, and Wall Street gurus have addressed the volatility issue in one manner or another. In fact, each day’s gyrations are explained, reported upon, recorded for later expert analysis, and head scratched about.
The only question I continue to have about all this comical hubbub is why don’t y’all just relax and enjoy it? If you own only high quality income generating securities, diversify properly, and adopt a disciplined profit-taking routine, you can make stock market volatility your very best friend (VBF).
Decades ago, a nameless statistics professor brought me out of a semi-comatose state with an observation about statisticians, politicians, and economists. “In the real world”, he said, “there are liars, damn liars, and any member of the groups just mentioned”. An economist or a politician, armed with a battery of statistics, is an ominous force indeed.
Well, now, all economists and statisticians have high powered computers and the ability to analyze volatility with the same degree of certainty (or is it arrogance) that they have developed with regard to individual-stock risk analysis, economic and geographical sector correlation dynamics, and future prediction in general.
Modern computers are so powerful, in fact, that economists and statisticians can now calculate the investment prospects of just about anything. So rich in statistics are these masters of probabilities, alphas, betas, correlation coefficients, and standard deviations, that the financial world itself has become, mundane, boring, and easy to deal with. Yeah, sure it has.
Since they can predict the future with such a high degree of probability, and hedge against any uncertainty with yet another high degree of probability, why then is the financial world in such a chronic state of upheaval? And why-o-why does the volatility, and the uncertainty, continue?
I expect that you are expecting an opinion (yet another opinion) on why the volatility is as pronounced as it seems to be compared with years past. Frankly, Scarlett, I can’t really make myself give a damn. The uncertainty that we are asked to believe is caused by volatility just simply is not. Uncertainty is the regulation playing field of the investment game… and of life, actually.
The more you invest in higher risk securities, the more you speculate on future directional change, the more you ignore growing income, and focus only on market value, the more uncertain your investment environment becomes. So risk, speculation, poor diversification, low income generation, and up only market value expectations combine to exacerbate uncertainty, but nothing can eliminate it… only that is certain.
But this machine driven, hyper-volatility that we have been experiencing recently, has been magnified by the darkest forces of the “dismal science” and the changes that it has encouraged in the way financial professionals view the makeup of the modern investment portfolio.
On the bright side, enhanced market volatility actually enhances the power of the equity and income security trading disciplines and strategies within the Market Cycle Investment Management (MCIM) methodology… an approach to market reality that embraces market turbulence, and harnesses market volatility for results that leave most professionals either speechless or in denial.
