Genius!

Monday I posted an essay titled Beware the Lucky Guesser, where I paraphrased a recent conversation between a young trader and a seasoned money manager. Well, the latter---who advised viewers to "buy high" because stocks are "going higher"---was on CNBC a few minutes ago, and guess what; since just the other day he decided to dig into the thirty stocks comprising the Dow Jones Industrial Average and, as a result, has determined that the Dow is likely to take a 15% dive over the next two months, then bounce back sometime in October to finish the year at an all-time high. Although he's only telling his clients to do a little profit taking---as opposed to sell everything now and buy back in 8 weeks.

He's a careful genius this one. If he's wrong and the market sells off and doesn't rebound by year-end, he was right about the selloff. He can simply say his analysis was perfect in terms of predicting a decline, it's just that the market's taking a bit longer to gather itself before ascending to new heights. Or, if he's wrong and stocks continue to rally from here, he was right about the reaching of record levels by year-end, it's just that the world agreed with his bullish call sooner than he expected and therefore didn't allow the big selloff to occur first. Beautiful!

In all my years in the investment business I have discovered only one guru who consistently got it right, Sir John Templeton. He made the following uncanny prediction:

"There will always be bull markets followed by bear markets followed by bull markets."