Smarter Money: Cease and Desist!

Suddenly, everybody's not so hot any more. For months I have been saying, "Market's crummy; be careful." Every time I did I got these incredibly brazen emails, hundreds of them, saying that I was calling the bottom with my "market's-crummy" rap and they would show me. The tone of these emails was always the same. "I was up 100% last year, and I beat the pants off you in 1998." To which I would say to my partners, also grizzled vets, "Don't these guys know I am just stating the obvious? Don't they know that I am just looking at my screen and identifying carnage?"

I don't get those emails any more. The people who "bet against me" are now margined out, flat on their back, out of the game. The people who hounded me with, "How can you take something off the table, the bull market lives," aren't even in the stadium to boo anymore.

Don't get me wrong. I am not gloating. But the comeuppance of those who thought this game was easy isn't so terrible. The notion that you can look at a chart and determine a stock's direction, without any other information, is strictly a bull-market notion. In bear markets, charts get created by Buzz and Batch. In bear markets, the volume is so thin that the chart doesn't mean jack.

I know dozens of people who, in the last year, have quit their jobs to go try to call the next point or two in stocks. They pick certain stocks and trade them all day. Or they work on what they regard to be safer Nasdaq stocks and trade them. ...