Tuesday, February 19, 2013

a sign of the top?

The second defining event of the past few days is the surge of publicity surrounding the 16-year-old Hollywood actress who claims to be making a killing as a daytrader.

So daytrading is back!  Remember how the media lionized Barbra Streisand as a daytrading genius in 1999?  It was a sign of a historic top forming for stocks.

Now our media savants have gone one better:  The new daytrading queen they've anointed is only a teenager.  (Gosh, why did it take me so long to figure out how easy it is to get rich?)

Think about this angle for a moment:  Would our media gatekeepers have dared to hype a story about a teenage daytrader during the Lehman crisis in 2008?  Hardly.  We find the tale entertaining today, and even sort of plausible, because stock prices have roared higher for the past four years.  The excesses of a bull market manifest themselves near the top, not the bottom.

-- Richard Band, 2/19/13

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