I'm surprised, not a single reply to these financial threads today. Does everyone have Columbus Day off???

Or, since the stock market has regained half of last week's losses in a single day, do we all think we're out of the woods? Is the Panic of 2008 already yesterday's news?

Maybe today is a dead cat bounce. Actually, check out the animation in this link. Who knows? Maybe the last 5-6 years since the dot-com crash is one big dead cat bounce? Maybe today's rally was just a speed bump on the way down the precipice started last week?

I've wondered for a long time now about the great bull market that started in the 80's. If you look at a chart of the stock market over time, although there's a general upward trend, the positive and negative periods always seems to balance each other out. But since the early 80's, the stock market is just way, WAY up and there's no balancing negative performace to balance it out. We've had a succession of bubbles propping up the market and the economy, plus the Fed and gov't have gotten more sophisticated as managing the economy. I don't want to sound all doom-and-gloom or anything, but unless we've truly licked the business cycle, I'm still wondering if the true adjustment isn't still out there ahead of us.

It could be sudden and extremely painful, or it could be like Japan, where the stock market just grinds lower and lower for decades. Stocks could stay down so long that when our kids grow up, they won't understand how any of us in our generation thought that buying and holding stocks was a smart way to save for retirement. But I guess that's how these cycles usually work--things go so low for so long that everyone is sick of looking at it. Only then does it suddenly boom and start the next cycle. As long as people are still bullish enough about stocks, even with last week's drop, to agree with the idea of "Buy the dips," then stocks haven't fallen enough yet. Anyway, just my random thoughts for the day.