I read Ted Warrens book a long time ago. I think he was really on to something but perhaps not exactly the way he had imagined. Below is just what the title of this post says. I am not certain of anything but I think old Ted would have been interested in this one...

Dear Poppy,

Yes, the Motley Fool sends me stuff daily. I wish I had a million dollars so I could utilize all their great insight.
Actually, they have shown signs of panicking with the crowd during some of the recent plummets in the market. It pays to be a contrarian, a word coined by the late Ted Warren. He was a simple man who made millions in the stock market simply by spotting patterns in the ups and downs in the market over a period of years. He tried to attribute these predictable swings to insider manipulation but I am now more inclined to think they may have been more, the manifestations of the mass unconscious causing people to act as the schools of fish in the Ocean, turning and lurching in unison to the commands of an unseen choreographer.
My mother, of all people, pointed out to me-that when they all sell and I buy-and then they all buy (driving the price up) and I sell, I am making money off from them. She seems to think this is somehow unfair. I told her if they are stupid followers they will loose their money one way or another and why shouldn't I profit from it? She knows she would be one of the loosers. Right now though the market is stuck waiting for Allan Greenspan to make his next move. Historically April is rally month and I think things will start upward in a big way. We'll see.
Christopher Carolan the man who wrote The Spiral Calendar thinks he can predict, with great accuracy, the future positions of the market. He has studied patterns and results, and found some amazing repetitions. Still I think this is much like predicting the weather. There are just too many variables and external factors for long term forecasting to have any
serious accuracy. Short term is more realistic. His track record bears this out.

Adaire, thank you for a post worth reading ... and reading again. The words in your note reflect thoughts that have crossed my mind a time or two, and your theory about insider manipulation vs. the mass unconscious definitely merits consideration. I believe you are probably correct, although others might get a case of the shivers just contemplating such a theory ... to those purists I would say that what really matters with our investments is the end result, not how we get there.

Marsha G.

Marsha,

Nice to here from you. I know what you mean about peoples perceptions. It really is strange how and/or why people do the things they do. Many years ago one February, my husband, daughter and I, went to Florida to visit my mother who had moved there about four years before. My mother had been telling me for years how wonderful it was that house plants grew wild everywhere. To a girl from the deserts of Utah this was indeed wonderful. On the return trip I carried, on my lap, little potted starts of everything. For the next month I busied myself with re-potting and cultivating, learning names and lore. I noticed right at first that the grocery store where I bought my supplies was adding to and then expanding their houseplant section. I joked about this being all for me. By summer old service stations were being converted into houseplant shops. Am I the center of the Universe? Of course not. Each of these people probably had their own private reason for wanting houseplants at that time. Marketers pick up on this and promote it to the masses but there are times when they decide they want to push something and nothing they do has the desired result. In the same vein, my husband accidentally flooded the basement one time, which prompted him to take his old slot cares out of the now wet cardboard box where they had rested for better than ten years. He got to thinking about the additions he had hoped to add to the lot and went in search of sellers of these things. Nothing was available, but within months a news story about the resurgence of this once popular past time prompted him to search again. Yes, it was the new hot thing.

My daughter stopped over this morning on her way home from her tech support job for the new Windows Me operating system. She was telling me how strange it is that people seem to have the same problems at the same time. Last month it was anti virus software crashing their systems and this month they are all having network connection problems.

I don't see why the Stock Market wouldn't be subject to this, whatever it is. I do think going against the grain and trying to figure out what the grain is,takes a detached shrewdness that is well worth mastering.

Adaire