Begin forwarded message:
> From: “R. A. Hettinga”
> Date: Wed Jul 24, 2002 11:45:45 PM US/Pacific
> To: Digital Bearer Settlement List
> dcsb [at] ai.mit [dot] edu, fork [at] xent [dot] com
> Subject: Buy? (was Re: It’s back? Triple-digit Dow gains at 2PM…)
>
> A bull market climbs a wall of worry — on record volume.
>
> Yeah, I know, it’s different this time. Pay no attention to the bear
> behind the curtain, and all that.
>
> However, at the end of the *last* bear market, in 1983 — yup, that
> long ago — Granville sell-orders caused bloodbaths with boring
> regularity, a stockholm-syndrome economy had recently been delivered
> of Keynesian monetary apparatchiks at the Fed and elsewhere, and
> Henry “Dr. Doom” Kauffman opined offhand that interest rates *might*
> come down finally… and pop! went the market, sending the NYSE
> volume through the roof. (Record volume then was around a hundred
> mill. Yesterday, ladies and germs, it was upward of 2 point something
> *billion* shares).. Back then, I was a mail-cart-pushing,
> key-punching “administration” clerk at Morgan Stanley in Chicago,
> chief scrounge for a bunch of Masters of the Universe, and everybody
> at Morgan thought the resulting price-pop was just a technical rally
> and wouldn’t last either. :-). Six months later, people *still* said
> it wouldn’t last, and a girlfriend’s uncle was saying that it was too
> late, he’d missed the train, so he was going to stay out ’till the
> market came back down a bit. By that time, the Dow was at, what,
> 1600? I wonder if he’s still out, waiting…
>
>
> A 40% decline is a big chunk of change, boys and girls, even if it’s
> 40% of a bubble. Actually, by my count, it’s 100% of the bubble, but
> that’s just me. After all, Amazon and EBay’s P/Es still need a
> pressurized cabin to breathe in.
>
> So, yes, the market may go lower, but not much more, relatively
> speaking. At some point, and fairly soon, I bet, someone’s going to
> realize that, even though you wouldn’t want to actually trade one for
> a house, tulips are still nice things to have around.
>
> Hint: Interest rates are rediculuously low, they aren’t going up any
> time soon, and, if we can survive the election, the recently-started
> CEO witch-hunt won’t be too much more than Street theater, probably
> not resulting in much in the way of regulation or legislation. The
> threat of which, frankly, probably caused this recent explosive
> decompression in the first place. Your tax dollars at work, if you
> will.
>
> So, in light of the erstwhile bloodbath on Capital Hill, and the real
> one we just saw a few days ago in the market, it may be time for
> people to remember what Mr. Rothschild said, and buy now while
> there’s blood in the streets.
>
> As to whether the accounting is “rigged”, remember what Robert
> Heinlein said: “Who cares if the game is rigged? You can’t win if you
> don’t play.”
>
>
>
> Cheers,
> RAH
> The aforementioned girlfriend, by the way, traded *me* in for an
> actual Rothschild in 1984, after I insisted on going back to school
> and talking my way into the back door at the University of Chicago to
> boot. The cost of anything being the foregone alternative, it
> sometimes seems to me I’m *still* paying for that detour, but that’s
> a bear of a different color, and it’s okay as long as I don’t look
> behind the curtain, right? :-).
>
> – — begin forwarded text
>
>
> Status: RO
> From: Somebody Else
> To: “R. A. Hettinga”
> Subject: Re: It’s back? Triple-digit Dow gains at 2PM…
> Date: Wed, 24 Jul 2002 21:44:19 -0600
>
> Bob,
>
> So. Let’s see. The market’s all the way back up to… what? Last
> Friday’s
> close?
>
> Iiiiirrraaational iinnndeed.
>
>
>
>
> – —– Original Message —–
> From: “R. A. Hettinga”
> To: “Digital Bearer Settlement List”
> Sent: Wednesday, July 24, 2002 2:02 PM
> Subject: RE: It’s back? Triple-digit Dow gains at 2PM…
>
>
>> At 2:55 PM -0400 on 7/24/02, Somebody wrote:
>>
>>
>>> The market doesn’t close for two hours.
>>
>> The market just closed. Up 496.63, 6.45%, at 8198.9697.
>>
>> :-).
>>
>> You never catch the upticks if you don’t stay in the market…
>>
>> Cheers,
>> RAH
>>
>> —