Business people everywhere are freaking out over all the change that's been thrown at them in the last 5 months. Seth Godin has been telling business people about the change that's coming for about 35 years. His blog has 7,000 posts or something like that. He's written 20 books. He's been trying new ideas and failing, and having some great successes the whole time.
This podcast interview goes all over the place, in a good way. But some big themes of it, where Seth has great insights, are the difference between being a leader, and being a manager. There's a lot of change now, it's a good time to be a leader. Another theme of this interview, is that artists and creative people are leaders. They may not have a huge organization, but they open up "new territory" in some way. Other people follow.
Another big theme of this interview, is the difference between talent and skill. Are you willing to put in the time to learn whatever skills you need, in today's world? The concept "talent" is really overrated. More than anything, a good talk with Seth Godin is full of all kinds of insights, and one or two of them may be exactly the insights you needed to hear today, to move forward in today's weird and fast changing business world.
"We're living with a whole bunch of revolutions at once."
This is a CNBC report from March 9th, 2020, as stocks plummeted on Covid-19 shutdown fears, AND a whole slew of longer, underlying factors. The Dow was down about 1,700+ points at the time of this report. The Dow bottomed out at around 18,500, a couple weeks later.
Here's my 2020 predictions blog post, from my (now retired) personal blog, written on January 26,2020. The Dow was around 28,700 and still heading up, the Friday before I wrote this post. In that post, I predicted the Dow Jones Industrial Average would drop below 19,000 at some point in 2020. I also made predictions for the Nasdaq, the S&P 500, and the Russell 2,000. Of those four predictions, all but the Nasdaq prediction have actually come true. And we're just 6 1/2 months into 2020.
I'll go into more detail on how and why I made those predictions as this blog goes on. But there's a simple rule I learned in the late 90's, about commodity charts. It also generally applies to the stock markets. When a long bull market ends, the price drops approximately 50% of the entire bull market run. So if you take this last bull market in the Dow, check this chart, (click to "Max" timeline), and figure the points risen from February 2009 low, to the peak in February, 2020. Cut that number in half, and subtract it from the Dow's peak in February 2020, of 29,551. The Dow should drop to roughly17,800, at some point. You can do the same thing to the other index charts. I padded my predictions a bit, knowing that there may be one big drop, a likely rally for a while as the inevitable bailouts kick in, and very likely another, lower drop, at some point in the future. I was just trying to predict the initial big drop.
Once a long term bull market is over, in commodities or stocks, the markets are turbulent, and basically pretty much impossible to predict, for quite a while. This usually turns into a wide trading range for some time. In today's Dow, for example, I think we'll see a big, long trading range from roughly 23,000 to 28,000, up and down, for another 1-3 years. There SHOULD be 1 or 2 more big, DEEP drops, to Dow 17,800 or so. But that might not happen because The Fed is basically willing to completely devalue the dollar (eventually) to prop up all the major U.S. corporations and banks that were functionally insolvent in March, after the stock plunge.
In any case, the stock market is basically a gambler's market, for the next year, at least, and probably 2-3 years. Yes, there will be incredible bargains for long term investors, like Warren Buffet and Charlie Munger at Berkshire Hathaway. But you're not Warren or Charlie.
In addition to that, with so many other factors happening in the economy, like real estate collapse that's coming, the continued retail apocalypse, precious metals rising, and more bankruptcy auctions coming than ever in human history, I think there will be thousands of amazing opportunities for small and mid-level investors, that will be much more lucrative than stocks over the next 1-3 years. So that's why I wouldn't touch the stock markets now, if I was in a position to invest a serious amount of money.
