I am by no means a professional investor. I’m not just a hobby investor, either. Call me a serious amateur, perhaps with a serious lack of time to really get good at being a part-time pro on the side.
In any case, here are some things I know that I thought I’d share:
- Capital is the stuff we use to make business go
- Goods are what capital makes
- Cash is the medium of exchange to acquire goods or capital
- Humans are what make capital and cash
- More humans equals more capital and cash
- When a population is expanding, so is cash and capital
- All that cash is going somewhere. . . .
With all of this in mind, especially the last item, my object is always to try to figure out where everyone is going to start putting their money before they all figure out where they’re going to put their money.
In mid-2000 at the start of the big market slide, where did everyone put their money that they pulled out of the stock market that made the market go down? I haven’t done any serious analysis, but I would offer that real estate was booming around that time. It kept going while the stock market started recovering in 2003, though. So, where was the money coming from that was floating both real estate and the stock market?
We know that real estate is now cooling off, and interest rates are probably about to peak. I suspect a lot of people are doing what I’m doing. Lately I’ve found some pretty attractive CDs and bonds. Perhaps everyone else is taking money from stocks and locking in these higher-than-recent average and less risky places?
Maybe everyone’s gone speculating in oil and gold futures? Note that gold also went up over the last few years, from the $330 range in 2003 (don’t quote me on that year), up to around $730 early this year. It fell back when the market rallied earlier this year, but has recovered back to $620 or so this summer.
Then what next? What is everyone else going to start doing next week?