More On The Bottom Callers

Last Friday I posted a piece about, 'bottom callers' siding with comments made by Michael Panzner on Kudlow & Co in which he said;

At bottoms people don't even see them coming and that's the tradition, that's the way markets have worked for hundreds of years. When you have everyone running around now that they see the light at the end of the tunnel it means they see an on-coming freight train.

Barry Ritholtz of the BIG PICTURE picked up on this on Monday.

Bottom Callers Run Rampant

Last week, I questioned the conventional wisdom which claimed that there was Not Enough Bullish Sentiment?

It seemed that there were plenty of Bulls who looked at the 15% pullback in the S&P500 as an ordinary dip-buying opportunity.

In a moderate recession, an 85 day, 15% drop would likely be insufficient to reflect the changes in both growth and earnings -- much less a deeper, more protracted recession.

The counter-argument is that the Fed has flooded so much cash onto the system, the recession no longer would matters.

Looking from a sentiment perspective, its hard to say that the we've seen the sort of fear that typically accompanies a lasting market bottom. There's still plenty of speculative juice around. Consider these headlines from over weekend:

• Barron's: Are You Ready for Dow 20,000 (this year!)
• Vince Farrell on We've Seen Our Bottom
• Barron's cover story: Hitting Bottom? Several Banks and Brokerages Are Ready to Pop Up for Air
• Jim Cramer on An End to the Bear Market? and why this is A Turning Point
• Insiders, at Least, See Reason to Smile
• Just about anything at Forbes.


The closest thing to an admonition of caution was Barron's Technical columnist, Michael Kahn, who called this The Market Bottom That Wasn't.

That doesn't mean we can't see a decent bounce here -- there's lots of liquidity, and as we saw last week, the market stopped going down on bad news. That's usually good for a 5-10-15% counter trend rally. We saw that begin last week.

But Dow 20,000 this year? I highly doubt it . . .

Be warned that some of the links above require registration. I highly doubt Dow 20,000 will be reached too. In fact the Dow will be lucky to finish above 12,000 by the end of this year.