Benjamin Graham, called the father of fundamental investing, said “in the short run the market is a voting machine; in the long run, it is a weighing machine.” A dilemma investors seem to face today is that the ‘short run’ seems to be more like the ‘long run’. We are particularly aware of the emotions of this market and that investors can change their ‘vote’ about the future very often. But we hold firmly to Mr. Graham’s belief that the ‘long run’ makes more sense and that the fundamentals will eventually be ‘weighed’ by the market.
Stay calm and carry on
Easy to say but hard to do. Therefore, we try to look past the emotion and at the fundamentals and agree with Liz Ann Sonders, Chief Investment Strategist for Charles Schwab & Co, who writes this opinion about the current situation, “We still think the bull market is intact as global monetary policy is loose, economies aren’t falling off a cliff, and the US consumer is in good shape, supported further by falling commodity prices.”