Quote from galvinlee888:
You will NOT be able to find out the real reason for the momentum of the market, indeed no single retail trader could. Also, there is no point to know it as well, as I said, the purpose of a trader is to make money, and not asking why (This is not one of the PhD project to find out the root cause of the market).
The market getting slightly soft now, but the long term UP trend still not yet broken, I am holding on my Long Position, still haven't decided if I like to ADD more LONG Position.
That's ridiculous. You're proposing that it's fine for a trader to be like a driver without a license. While it is certainly intuitive to drive and one really doesn't need training to move and steer the car, understanding traffic is why the license is a must. The unlicensed driver is like the trader who thinks he's everything in a boom and then loses everything again in the ensuing crash. Why? Because he didn't understand traffic flows and thus had no real predictive ability, but only a (temporarily) functioning system of pushing the gas and break peddles.
And yes I know economists tend to be horrible traders, but that is simply because they're licensed drivers who can't drive. Sort of like old people, I guess.
In general, the reason markets go up is because there is more money chasing the same stocks and they go down because of less. This creates the trend. If there is no fiscal expansion/contraction then stocks will range.
Then we have sentiment and sometimes mass-hysteria which causes crashes and bubbles. In 1987 it crashed because asset valuation increases had greatly exceeded those of the money supply (due to sentiment). Then it obviously corrected a bit too zealously (due to sentiment).
The "state of the economy" is also mostly irrelevant, although can impact of course the speed of a move though not the general direction. The key factor is that inflation usually goes along with a booming economy, and deflation to the opposite. However you can have fiscal expansion plus rising stock prices with economic dismality, such as we have now and some time during the depression of the '20's. If memory serves me, another big fall came after that. I don't think anyone is going to argue here that the economy has recovered anything like 50% since the bottom.
To sum up, in breadth the market moves due to (in order of importance):
-Money supply
-Sentiment & Hysteria
Note that Sentiment can do whatever and is predictable only to the extent that you can always reasonably assume that a contrarian position to an extreme is favorable. Money supply is far more predictable, although not by any means a "given". It depends on the central banks of the world.
It is also my opinion that if there weren't so many morons, the indices would not have the kind of gyrations but instead move much more smoothly along the direction of money supply. Funny enough, it seems that without sentiment speculation would become logically impossible. Someone has to take the other side of a trade...
By the way, I am talking about macro-economic trends so this does not apply to single stock trading in any way, where a lot of the performance does depend on the business qualities (although in a bear market perhaps not even the best performing business will have its share price rise, which is why I think individual stock investors generally should be long/short on good/bad businesses because it is not their business to predict the overall market, but relative success. Oh well.)
To conclude, on any given day you can ask yourself where the market is related to money supply and sentiment. Today, the market is pretty far ahead of the money supply (imo) and sentiment is tremendously bullish (why?). This is the ideal situation for a big correction.
By the way the best measure of long-term sentiment may be the market's P/E, because both price and earnings move with money supply. There's all sorts of surveys for short-term sentiment.
Sorry for the long post.