Interpolated somewhere among these maxims is the angst and avarice of diving back into the market now, following a 200 percent total return from the lows nearly five years ago. For better or worse, it seems as if Mom & Pop are back, my colleague Charles Stein reports. The handful of you keeping score at home know that the Dow Jones industrial average just cracked 16,000—paging Brian Williams and Scott Pelley—with stock funds taking in just under $175 billion in the first 10 months of the year, their most since the fateful year 2000. This comes after a good half-decade period that can perhaps best be described as the Great Evacuation from equities. And it comes as bonds, the beneficiary of a fetish-like $1 trillion of inflows during said Evacuation, clinch their first annual loss since 1999.
Read Full Article »