No, You're Not Smarter Than Everybody Else

So you think you can time the market? You think you can make money from buying and selling stocks at the right time?

Well, unless you're a privileged banker, you don't have access to information that everybody else doesn't have, and even if you are very smart, there's no way to know where the market will go in the near future. Stocks can go up on terrible news, and they can go down on good news. In the short term, markets move in random ways. They are impossible to predict without inside information from central bankers and other market manipulators.

However, in the long term, stocks do move in ways that can be predicted ahead of time. Debt laden companies in dying industries do go bankrupt, and high tech companies with no income and no product except for a few vague ideas don't retain their stellar valuations for ever.

Over time, P/E ratios return to their norm, and so does the Dow/Gold ratio. Over the long term markets can be predicted. Short term, they are rigged casinos where the average guy gets fleeced by well informed bankers.

Wall Street

By Vlad Lazarenko - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, Link