A recent note from David Rosenberg highlights the schizophrenic market we have been experiencing over the last few years. What works one year quickly stops working the next year. Thus far in 2010 that trend has been true again. After a very bullish 2009 Rosenberg now thinks the market could be entering a bearish phase in 2010. And that means, what worked in 2009 likely won’t work in 2010:
“It is interesting that heading into 2008 all you had to do as an investor was flip everything around from market performance in 2007 — across just about every asset class. Then in 2009, what you wanted to do was the exact opposite as what worked in 2008 (see Table 1 below). Here we are in 2010 and it seems to us as if, yet again, what worked the year before is not going to work in the coming year and vice versa. Take emerging markets for example — most of them doubled in 2009, and here we are in the first month of 2010 and the MSCI excluding Japan Asian index is already trading at its lowest level in two months. The region still trades at 2x book value versus the 1.8x historical norm so don’t think for a second that we have approached some oversold low … at least not yet.”
Source: Gluskin Sheff
Mr. Roche is the Founder and Chief Investment Officer of Discipline Funds.Discipline Funds is a low fee financial advisory firm with a focus on helping people be more disciplined with their finances.
He is also the author of Pragmatic Capitalism: What Every Investor Needs to Understand About Money and Finance, Understanding the Modern Monetary System and Understanding Modern Portfolio Construction.
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