I'm a hold-and-forget investor so this is mostly academic, though I can rearrange my 403b without penalty. Here's an idea that we've been kicking around (and no, not going to bet the house on it).
There's been a lot of talk about the end of the bull run of the market, and my own theory is that since the market is people-driven, there's room for misinformation, panic and outright deception (cf. "The Big Short") in addition to data and its statistical analysis. Why not keep an eye on what other people do, much as Google's search engine itself runs on a ranking system partly based on how many other pages have linked to it?
Here's the idea - flag when everyone else is panicking about the economy. Looking at Google Trends, the peak search for "Recession" was in January of 2008, while the Dow was still reasonably high but wavering downward. Hindsight says this would have been a pretty good predictor of dire problems, but then hindsight is like that.
Might it not make sense to keep an eye on social inputs (say, searching for "recession") and use that information along with the usual cascade of numbers, arguments and bone-castings that go on, or is this already part of the investment community's toolkit?
Submitted June 30, 2018 at 09:19PM by LateralThinkerer https://ift.tt/2KoxSH1
