Ein netter Artikel zu Stimmungs lage an der Wall Street.
"Die Trendwende kommt... nur wann, ja wann?"
" The Wall Street Uncertainty Principle
By James B. Stewart
February 6, 2001
PEOPLE ON WALL STREET can be so greedy
sometimes. Last week Alan Greenspan and the
Fed offered a second half-point rate cut and
said their bias favored more rate reductions.
Wall Street complained that it wasn't enough.
Then, when the unemployment rate came in
Friday at a larger-than-expected 4.2%, they
complained that wasn't enough either.
Fortunately, the rest of us aren't part of Wall
Street. A full-point drop in interest rates in a
single month is an aggressive move. Unless the
laws of economics have been repealed, it will
stimulate the economy and bolster consumer
confidence.
When? That's the question obsessing Wall
Street right now. And the answer is, no one
knows.
Let's call this the stock-market version of the
uncertainty principle: The more precisely we
measure the recent past, the murkier the future
becomes. This helps explain why a slew of quarterly earnings reports last week had no consistent impact on stock prices. Corning (GLW) reported terrific earnings but sowed panic in the fiber-optic sector when it lowered the bottom rung of the range of its projected earnings by a penny a share. No one seemed to notice that Corning simultaneously raised the upper rung by one cent. Not that either move makes much difference. Applied Materials (AMAT) warned about a sudden slowdown in the chip sector, but its stock gained. The chip slowdown is apparently old news.
No wonder so many people were waiting for the latest earnings from Cisco Systems (CSCO). Cisco Chief Executive John Chambers, traditionally an optimist, has been making increasingly cryptic remarks about prospects for the giant networking concern, a tech bellwether. After the market close Tuesday, Cisco reported earnings that fell a penny short of Wall Street's consensus — hardly a catastrophe, but still disappointing from a company that has beaten earnings estimates for 25 straight quarters. As for the future, Chambers said only that Cisco is "cautious" as a result of a "pause" in the U.S. economic expansion.
In other words, Chambers doesn't know what the future holds either.
This is disconcerting to a Wall Street that spends billions filtering a river of information for the one drop that will give it an edge. Perhaps some fact is out there right now that will tell us whether the economy will pick up in July, or September, or January of next year. But for the patient, long-term investor, I suggest that it doesn't really matter.
Uncertainty is, in fact, a boon to investors who don't treat their portfolios like a full-time job. We remain in an unusual environment where most stocks are far off their highs of a year ago, with interest rates sharply lower and declining, with the prospect of a tax cut, with oil prices declining and the dollar stable. What more could we want? With recent gains in the Nasdaq, I raised a modest amount of cash, but I remain almost fully invested, with an emphasis in my core areas of technology, financial services, pharmaceuticals and biotech. I have added some of my recent recommendations in basic industry, such as Tyco International (TYC) and General Electric (GE), to take advantage of an economic upturn, whenever it comes. Unless there's a surprisingly big move up or down, I intend to ride out this period of uncertainty by taking a long winter's nap.
As usual, I am not predicting that the market will move either up or down in the short term. But long term, the trend of the stock market is to rise. At times like the present, when professional investors seem evenly split between bulls and bears, the odds favor being fully invested, or close to it."
Gute Nacht!
Esprit
:)
