With graduation approaching for the Class of 2009, college seniors are scrambling to find jobs by the spring. Let’s hope they don’t have their hearts set on Wall Street. By the time the big unwind is through, Wall Street (and peripheral sectors) will probably have lost more than a quarter of a million jobs. Unlike ’87 or ’01-’02, most of these jobs won’t be coming back.
Bear Markets
Pick Sectors, Not Stocks
These are the days when you either need to have a 20 year time frame or a 20 minute time frame, and either can be extremely profitable. In either case, owning the sector is going to give you all you need in terms of volatility, so leave the stock picking to the masochists.
Defensive Stocks Go Down Less, But They Still Go Down
As surely as day follows night, in a bear market environment, you will repeatedly hear the clarion call to “get defensive,” or to buy “consumer staples”. Ignore this call, individual investor, as it is merely a b-school trope that all the talking heads like to trot out in tough times to justify what they’re doing…
