Rainer's Investment Insights

S&P500, 5-day view, "jumping the gun" as early as Tuesday... THE FIVE-DAY VIEW:  In a race, the rally since Thursday last week would be deemed a 'false start' and participants would be disqualified, coming out of the blocks 3 days early. - I say, 'false start' because,  the outcome of Greece's second election attempt was NO foregone conclusion. Yet markets rallied!  In the financial world, however, such a 'false start' will be attributed to luck,  as long as the result confirms investors' anticipations, - or bad timing if the markets were to go down after that! DAX - moving up hesitantly Comparing the two charts on the left, you will note that the S&P500 (chart above) leads the DAX (second chart) by at least 2 days: S&P 500 starts its rally on Tuesday, the DAX waits till late Thursday.  The medium-term technical picture suggested that the DAX had been leading the US by as much as 2 weeks. A deviation from that pattern is ...

The world of investors is occupied by many kinds of people. We sort of accept that not all of them are infallible, super intelligent, visionary, -  full of integrity and purpose. That is why some of our investment guru's, probably fed up with their students' notorious retention levels (= 3%, statistically proven!) of even the most carefully structured and passionately delivered lecture, decided to get their own back by createing catch phrases, simplistic axioms, mystic syllables. Here a few samples: "Sell when others are greedy, buy when others are fearful " (Warren Buffet); "Sell in May and stay away until St. Leger's Day." (old English phrase describing the habits of London's City boys who leave stock markets in favour of horse racing season, the last race being on St. Leger's day in the autumn.) "Buy the Rumour, Sell the Fact" , don't know who said it first, but am sure it was a highly enlightened but vindictive teacher. ...