Sorry it was not meant as an attack
but pointing out the weakness of the arguments the poster put forward. And I should have been clearer since your post shows that some of what I tried to say got misunderstood. Whether the poster has posted a million posts or just one, is neither here or there. I concentrate on what people say...
What I meant by make either TA or fundamental argument was that there was no TA argument and the fundamental things were just superficial hype statements from media without any actual analysis or thought or fuller context.
Technically, you can definetly make an argument that we are about to have another leg up depending on which indicators one chooses to concentrate. But the way I read things still is that there is no clear trend in place.
I most definetly didn't mean that collapse of commodities is of no consequences. It just will not help the equity markets. Just think about the pressure in the broad market indices caused by the miners and mining related shares when they start falling for real.
The collapse of commodities signals demand falling. The futures markets fall faster and earlier compared to the physicals as they are very leveraged and people with good profit start unwinding their positions. This takes place at the same time when consumer demand is under severe pressure from the gas prices and raising interest rates and slow down in the real estate markets. US GDP is 75% consumer spending! (Some years ago it was 60%, recently 66% and now 75%! How come that percenatage has crept up while supposedly business investment should have been picking up slack from the consumer?)
Bubbles move in cycles from one place to another: dot com equities, then real eastate, then commodities. But the cycle is not just from one to another. At some point they all deflate when the weight of fundamentals prevents spin from any more fooling people. There is real asset value destructions: everything goes down. And I am not saying that this will take tomorrow or this month, but it will.
The equity markets have very difficult time of making any real headway when there are real outflows of funds plus mutual fund cash levels are at all time historical lows. Simply put, that means that they have to sell shares to cover any significant redemptions. There is no way out of it.
Yield curve is inverted and is getting more so. Unless things are different this time, it means recessions which is not in any way priced in. PIMCO and several other bond analysts have become bullish in the US bond markets. This means the yield curve will invert further.
Corporate profitability expectations are falling. At some point those expecations will have fallen so low that the companies results will look great against the lowered goal posts but that will not be case yet. The trend in earning expectations is down but it has just started.
Add to the above the possibility that inflation is not under control. Inflation is not CPI or PPI. It is inflation of the money supply which convenietly (for them) the fed is publishing less information than before.
Or and did I remember the question of USD? The fed has painted itself into a corner and I don't see any exit. It is just a question of time. Higher interest rates to support USD or lower to support economy.
An ex-fed board member basically said that the fed got it all wrong by not tighting more heavily into the strength and now faces the problem of tightening into weakness. The article was on Yahoo a couple of days ago.
As for MSFT and Vista, my point is that all the news around it at this point is pure hype and nothing else. The impact on MSFT and related companies bottom line is far away in future. It is far from certain that MSFT will actually meet the end of January 2007 ship date. There is also speculation that this might provide the push for some companies to move away from MSFT products. And no one with thousands of PC will upgrade until SP1 or so.
