Thursday, August 9, 2012

Deep Thoughts (Thursday Morning Insight Edition) Why Are Investors Fleeing Equities? (Hint: It’s Not the Computers)



Andrew Ross Sorkin writes: You’ve no doubt been reading a lot about a “crisis of confidence” on Wall Street in recent days after software problems at a big trading firm sent the stock market, briefly, into a tizzy.  Everyone is hyperventilating at the errant trades at the Knight Capital Group — suggesting, in the words of Arthur Levitt, that these malfunctions “have scared the hell out of investors.” The problems at the firm were immediately lumped together with Facebook’s glitch-filled initial public offering, the flash crash of 2010 and the rescinded public offering of BATS Global Markets, among others.

Apparently — if the experts are to be believed — these computer errors are the reason “investors are fleeing the markets like never before,” Dennis Kelleher, president of Better Markets, told The Los Angeles Times. Dozens of articles about the trading blunder included some form of that contention, using statistics showing that $130 billion or more had been withdrawn from mutual funds over the last year or so.

Let me offer a more straightforward explanation of why investors have left the stock market: it has been a losing proposition. An entire generation of investors hasn’t made a buck……


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