Trying to Predict the Market's Next Big Move

What Opening a Time Capsule From the Internet Bubble Shows Us

DALL-E via Bing

The impact of stock market predictions was different 50 years ago...

I've told this story before, but just one more time: As a young reporter at the now-defunct Boca Raton News, I was sent out to the Boca Raton Hotel and Club to cover the keynote speech at a convention by the late Pierre Rinfret. He was an economist who had been advisors to presidents, so he had cachet.

This was in 1974, and Rinfret's message was as clear as mud, but a big headline in those days: "The U.S. has a 50% chance of a depression worse than the 1920s."

I knew the lede of my story when I heard it!

Back then, before social media, careers were made by being quoted on making the right market call...

All it took was one good prediction, and everything else was forgotten.

Spencer Jakab, editor of the Wall Street Journal's Heard on the Street, had a great piece about this last week. His focus was Michael Burry of The Big Short fame, whose subsequent predictions have snared headlines, but went on to be wrong.

Burry isn't alone with such a checkered history of predictions. Jakab noted several others who were the kings and queens of their day...

There was newsletter writer Roger Babson before the 1929 crash... Elliott Wave theorist's Robert Prechter, who nailed the start of the bull market in 1982... and Elaine Garzarelli in 1987 with her prediction of a collapse just days before Black Monday.

They all went on to huge careers, despite never quite repeating that first big call. That's because the odds were not in their favor, or as Jakab wrote...

Numerous studies of expert opinion have shown that pundits are, as a group, as accurate as a coin flip.

But let's face it: investors love predictions...

They always have, and they always will, because everybody wants somebody to tell them what will happen next – even if those investors intellectually know that they might as well flip that coin themselves.

That reminded me of something I wrote in 1999, while working at TheStreet.com, where I was often being the Yin to Jim Cramer's Yang.

At the time, Abby Joseph Cohen, then of Goldman Sachs (GS), had become that era's stock market queen by getting that bull market right. (By the way, I interviewed earlier in her career, when she was at Drexel Burnham Lambert, and she was the contra-Wall Street in every way – unpretentious and very nice. But I digress...)

There was always pressure for me to come up with predictions. While at times I relented, getting a few right along the way, I often resisted.

As I wrote back then, as the market was spiraling higher (almost like a time capsule today)...

What the market did or will do bores me. It's a ticking time bomb. We all know that. But nobody knows the time on the clock! Cramer, the trader, can talk about the market as if it's a sport, and it is. (Another sign of a top?!) But at least with a sport there are odds.

Oh, I know that the market has become today's most popular pastime. I know it's all anybody is talking about. (Me, too, I just think it's mindless.) I also know that the argument about liquidity, and all of that money flowing into the market through 401-K plans, is a strong one.

And I know that as long as interest rates remain low and the economy remains prosperous – or appears to remain prosperous – different segments of this market will continue to cook. (I really do believe in that improved productivity thing that the Internet has created.

As recently as three years ago, I – as a financial journalist, in need of lots of info and data – never could've worked at home as often as I do now. Makes me three hours more productive per day, and a heck of a lot happier, because that's three hours I'm not commuting.)

I also know that there's a growing credit risk, as so many people buy way too much, from socks to stocks, on credit. (It's the stock part that has me worried.) I can't buy the "no inflation" story when oil prices and housing prices continue to soar. And I know I have a responsibility to continue reminding investors that at some point this party will end, just like all of the rest.

But (sorry, it must be the debater in me) I also have learned that trying to determine what this market may do is the ultimate exercise in futility. Which is why I concentrate on individual companies.

Bottom line, as I often say, is that whoever is quoted in the right place at the right time calling the market right will be the next guru.

Until then, Abby Joseph Cohen is queen for this day.

And me? I'm neither bullish nor bearish. I'm ambivalent. Couldn't really give a hoot. That may not make for good copy, or good TV, but I also can sleep at night. Better things to do with my time, like look for the B2B frauds.

Here's the crazy part: With a tweak here and a tweak there – like, maybe AI fraud replacing B2B frauds – I could've written the very same thing today. The more things change...

Meanwhile, have you seen VinFast Auto (VFS) lately?

It's the Vietnamese electric vehicle ("EV") maker that I lampooned in the August 18 On the Street after it skyrocketed on its first day of trading – before plunging over the course of the next few days, losing more than half its value... then soaring again.

The stock is up more today on no news. But that's after being up and up and up every day for the past week... more thanquadrupling, in fact.

That's what happens with thinly traded stocks – a wisp of wind can cause a stock to skyrocket or plunge.

The point is to be careful out there... And if you own VFS, don't go thinking you're smart, because you're not. The market has a way of humbling even the smartest – it does so every day. Onward…

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DISCLAIMER: This is solely my opinion based on my observations and interpretations of events, based on published facts, and should not be construed as investment advice.

(I write two investment newsletters for Empire Financial Research, Empire Real Wealth and Herb Greenberg’s Quant-X System. For more information, click here and here.)

Feel free to contact me at herbgreenberg@substack.com. You can follow me on Twitter or Threads @herbgreenberg.