Today was a weird day in the market. The Dow opened positive, turned negative and then soared almost 200 points to end the day. The market was fueled by upgrades by analysts to financial stocks Goldman Sachs, Bank of America and JP Morgan. The interesting part is that these stocks have seen extreme run ups from their March lows. Wasn’t the time to upgrade Goldman Sachs to a buy when it was trading below $100? Or Bank of America when it was trading in the single digits? Analysts are often late to the party and miss big moves in individual stocks. They will rate a stock a “buy” after it has had a huge move to the upside. Or rate a stock a ”sell” after the stock has dropped precipitously. It appears that investors are once again chasing stocks based on momentum plays. I find it interesting that as retail investors are buying, insiders are selling shares. I believe that these companies are good long term buys but i would load up on shares at cheaper levels.
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I remember hwo bad it got in February. I went bullish in October, waited through the November spill, and saw the end-of-year action as confirmation of my forecast. The February-March plummet hit me like a ton of bricks, and had me acknowledging that I had jumped the gun. I was so skittish, I chickened out until the S&P got to about 860 before reiterating a bull call.
I’m not a professional – these calls and the backtrack were done for http://www.enterstageright.com – but I was sufficiently in the thick of things to answer your question. Being early and being sandbagged later makes one skittish when it’s time to go bullish. The “visibility risk” is in being wrong _twice_, after counseling patience each time around. I think my experience, in my own non-professional way, recapitulated the experience of financials-analyst pros. Being burned in February made them too shy to jump on March and April.