What's wrong with this broadly bullish view is that the market always operates on the two axes of time and price. Sometimes time is important; sometimes price is. Large-cap bulls are focused on price now, but after a long period of slop, time is often more critical. That's because the longer it takes for an expected positive event to occur (e.g., a sharp rebound from the bottom of a range), the more impatient potential buyers become. The 200-day moving averages, which had been rising, plateau and begin to decline. At some point, shareholders decide to stop waiting for reinforcements to arrive and simply liquidate their positions on the next volley of bad news. If this happens en masse, the bottom can drop out of a quiescent range-trading market, resulting in a sharp, fast collapse.
Pennies not a zero sum game as much as some zero game.
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