From column Buy and Hope Investing - John Mauldin's

And let me also suggest that when we do get the problems worked out, and we will, the recovery that ensues may be breathtaking in its scope, as the technological changes that will be coming down the pike in the next 5-10 years are simply going to dwarf what we have seen in the past 30. Ray Kurzweil predicts that we will see twice as much change in the next 20 years as we saw all of last century. Think about the implications of that.

Just as we cannot let past performance and wishful thinking blind us to the reality that we confront today, we must not let 3-4 years of a slow Muddle Through world after this recession ends blind us to future opportunity. Projecting the current trends into the long future is nearly always a mistake. And the longer the trend goes, the more complacent (or negative) we get. But trends change. Remember that.

Just because a stock is down by 50% does not mean it cannot go down further. Think back to all the people who said Citi was a screaming buy at $20 or ... (pick a stock!). I want to see earnings start to settle down and maybe even rise. Given the nature of what could be the negative environment for earnings in the second quarter, there could be one more leg to this bear market. Though I must admit that I am surprised we haven't seen some type of tradable rally. I thought the money coming back into the market from hedge fund redemptions might have been a boost, but evidently it has not been. Caution is the word today.




My good friend Peter Bernstein (who at 89 is still one of the most insightful and important analysts in the world) wrote a very insightful essay in the Financial Times called "The Flight of the Long Run." Let me quote a few selected paragraphs:

"The cold statistics have hardly been encouraging for the traditional [buy and hold] view. On a total return basis, the Ibbotson data show that the S&P 500 has underperformed long-term Treasury bonds for the last five-year, 10-year, and 25-year periods, and by substantial amounts.

"These data are not to be taken lightly. If the long-run expected return on bonds in the future were higher than the expected return on equities, the capitalist system would grind to a halt, because the reward system would be completely out of whack with the risks involved. After all, from the end of 1949 to the end of 2000, the S&P 500 provided a total annual return of 13.1 per cent, while long Treasuries could grind out only 5.8 per cent a year.

"But does this history really tell us anything about what lies ahead? Neither the awesome historical track record of equities nor the theoretical case is a promise of a realized equity risk premium. John Maynard Keynes, in an immortal observation about the future, expressed the matter in simple but obvious terms: "We simply do not know."

"Relying on the long run for investment decisions is essentially relying on trend lines. But how certain can we be that trends are destiny? Trends bend. Trends break. Today, in fact, we have no idea where any trend lines might begin or end, or even whether any trend lines still exist. (Emphasis mine)

Gentle Reader, pay special attention to this next paragraph: "... There is an even deeper reason to reject the long run as a guide to future investment policy. The long-run results we can discern in the data of stock market history are not a random set of numbers: each event was the result of a preceding event rather than an independent observation. This is a statement of the highest importance. Any starting conditions we select in the historical data cannot replicate the starting conditions at any other moment because the preceding events in the two cases are never identical. There is no predestined rate of return. There is only an expected return that may not be realized."

For those of you who invested in 1997, with expectations of 15% forever, you can sadly confirm that last sentence.