A Random Walk Down Wall Street; en apa med förbundna ögon

No one can know for sure where the stock market will go next. 

Stock markets regularly go to irrational extremes.

But there are worrisome signs that investor optimism may have gotten out of hand. The recent exuberance of investors raises the question of whether they are making the same mistakes they made in the past.

In the stock market bubble of the late 1990s, investors believed that the internet would usher in a golden period of extraordinary economic growth — until they didn’t, sparking a recession and a roughly 40 percent decline in the S&P 500 between 2000 and 2002.

Less than a decade later, a housing bubble led to the worldwide financial crisis and the deepest recession since the 1930s. The S&P 500 lost roughly half its value. 

These days, stock market valuations (such as the multiple of stock prices to average corporate earnings) are at one of the highest levels in its 230-year history when normalized.

 We are on track to run unprecedented government deficits over the next several years, and our national debt and related interest payments will rise to unsupportable levels. 

We do not know when the next financial crisis will occur, but if nothing is done to rein in the deficit, a crisis is inevitable. 

Yet despite the presence of all these risks, stock market valuations are at one of their highest levels in history.

To time the market successfully, you have to make two correct decisions: when to get out and when to get back in. 

A regular savings program will enable you to buy more shares when prices are low and future returns are high.

Burton G. Malkiel New York Times 15 August 2025

Mr. Malkiel is an American economist and financial executive. His 50-year-old book, “A Random Walk Down Wall Street,” is widely credited with popularizing stock index funds.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/15/opinion/stock-market-advice-investing.html

 

“A blindfolded monkey throwing darts at a newspaper’s financial pages could select a portfolio that would do just as well as one carefully selected by experts.”– Burton Malkiel, author of “A Random Walk Down Wall Street” 

Burton Malkiel’s metaphor has been one of the most controversial in Wall Street. It questions an active manager’s ability to outperform the market and reduces outperformance to sheer luck. 

Although the book “A Random Walk Down Wall Street”  was initially published in 1973, this quote still remains one of the most controversial among active asset managers.

https://englundmacro.blogspot.com/2022/04/borsapan-slog-bade-fondproffsen-och.html


Många hade fel om 2002

Don't Sell Out By Burton G. Malkiel.

Wall Street Journal 2001-09-26

Mr. Malkiel, a professor of economics at Princeton, is author of "A Random Walk Down Wall Street" (W.W. Norton, 7th edition, 2000).

While more than a $1 trillion loss in market value was punishing enough, many commentators have expressed concern that the market is still overpriced and that the potential for further declines is large. 

Simply put, the worry-warts argue that with today's price/earnings ratio (P/E) still in the low 20s (well above its long-run average of about 15), stocks are overpriced and that corporate earnings are greatly overstated, making the actual P/E dangerously high.

While stocks may continue to fall in the short-run, investors should reject such a negative view.

https://www.internetional.se/nuhardetvant.htm


Indexing and the Random Walk

Has the growth of index investing, and index-benchmarked active investing, warped markets? It’s an increasingly urgent question as passive investments’ share of total assets continues to increase. 

Plenty of intelligent people think that the answer is “yes.” 

https://englundmacro.blogspot.com/2022/01/indexing-and-random-walk.html


 – Ett automatiskt månadssparande har otroligt många fördelar, säger Frida Bratt, sparekonom på Nordnet.

Frida Bratt konstaterar att det är väldigt svårt att tajma börsen.

– Det slipper du när du månadssparar. Förhoppningsvis köper du ibland när börsen har gått ner litegrann vilket ger dig ett lägre aktiepris och fler fondandelar för din insättning. 

Och ibland köper du när börsen har gått upp. På det sättet sprider du riskerna.

https://englundmacro.blogspot.com/2025/01/frida-bratt-konstaterar-att-det-ar.html

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