Beating The Summer Doldrums
The last two weeks of summer can be brutal. At work, there is a tendency to drift into automatic pilot until after Labor Day, which begins a hectic sprint to the end of the year. At home, bored kids desperately need to go back to school so they will quit playing Xbox. As adults, it’s becoming all too easy to spend too much time channel surfing, Internet surfing or both, now that summer is just about played out. If you’re an investor or advisor, the stock market is in a similar state. Last Friday’s trading range on the Dow was the narrowest in 5½ years and the 3-point range on the S&P was the narrowest in 7½ years. Investors are in the summer doldrums as many have gone to cash because of the Euro-crisis, the impending fiscal cliff, the Presidential election, or the usual fears of an October meltdown. At a time like this, we have two clear choices: 1) We can worry about what is going to happen next, like the Anxious Idiot recently wrote...