The Dow Jones Industrial Average was up 7.45% in April. We just saw the Dow’s best two-month percentage increase in seven years!
I don’t encourage investors to fixate on short-term performance. However, I haven’t heard much about this good news, so I thought I’d share it with you:-)
So, does this mean we hit a bottom for this bear market on March 9th? Nobody knows. Short-term market and economic forecasting is difficult to get right. The odds of successfully predicting the precise bottom are as good as flipping a coin. Odds are that you will be right about half the time. Over the next six months the stock market will either be up or it will be down…your guess is just as likely to be right as ours. Predicting when things will get better is worthless because nobody knows. What we do know is that the economy doesn’t usually turn until after the stock market bottoms. In other words…the stock market is usually a leading economic indicator.
Looking longer term we do have much more confidence in forecasting the direction of the market. We believe that the next 10 years should be better for investors than the last 10. We believe that now is a good time to invest if you are truly a long-term investor .
