No. of Recommendations: 13
- Each of the previous 3x within 1 year (2008 and 2015) or 1/2 year (in 2022) it overshoot itīs typical line and continued to slide down to the lower border or (2009) even lower
Seems right.
But perhaps this is almost a little like sorta a tautology going on here. Recall that my own smoothed value line was scaled up/down to give the best match to stock price history. So more or less by construction, the price is going to be above that trend about half the time, and below the other half. So if it has been up for a while and starts sliding, a move down below the average is necessarily going to happen sooner or later (to keep the average right with equal and opposing ups and downs on average), so it wouldn't be surprising if that were right away while momentum is down.
I guess I would have to agree that an overvalued (technically just more-richly-valued-than-usual) stretch being followed by a cheaper-than-usual stretch is more than a 50/50 shot, but I still prefer to assume agnostically that the price will be typical at the end of the investment interval I'm interested in, rather than try to in effect forecast a future cheap stretch! Enough people call me a permabear already.
Speaking of permabears, I'd be embarrassed to admit how much I've made since May 2 being net short Berkshire stock. Per the reasoning above, that's not a bet on the stock getting cheap, merely a wager that "richly valued" would be followed soon enough by ordinary valuation. I don't think the price slide has anything in particular to do with anything from the annual meeting, just predictable mean reversion (in outcome if not timing). Over time, the price isn't going to rise faster than the value.
Jim
