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Old 05-14-2005, 08:19 PM
DesertCat DesertCat is offline
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Join Date: Aug 2004
Location: Scottsdale, Arizona
Posts: 224
Default Re: Reconciling \"Random Walk\" with \"Market Wizards\"

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As Malkiel mentions somewhere in his book, the problem with this kind of thinking is that although the inefficiencies are obvious looking back at the bubble, there was no real way to identify places to short at the time to take advantage of the overvaluations.

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Well there's two sides to that, first is that the inefficiencies were there, proving how inefficient the modern market can still get.

And shorting isn't the province of most value investors. The risk/reward isn't attractive and the Ben Graham school accepts that no matter how out of whack the market gets, no-one has any idea when it will correct. So staying on the sidelines is the best option for the intelligent invester. This is partly why a market bubble can persist for so long and get so extreme.

But there were a couple ways to profit from the internet boom. First occured during the boom, supposedly low growth "old economy" companies suffered from lack of interest and were cheap. I wasn't actively investing then so I can't attest to the truth of this.

But, after the bubble I can attest to the great valuations in the internet market. Internet companies sometimes sold for less than cash, even after announcing the decision to shut down and return all of that cash. That's the standard Ben Graham play, stay in cash during the crazy times, and dive in during the over-correction.

Once again, both episodes show how inefficient the market can get, and why people like Buffett say the market is frequently efficient, but not always.
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