Tuesday, October 14, 2008

Buying Opportunity of the Life-time Or Just Sucker's Rally?

Global markets rebounded handsomely today after some great uncertainties in relation to which direction the markets should move, as shown by the intra-day volatility of most Asian markets today.

Fundamental question is, is this a Buying Opportunity of the Life-time Or Just Sucker's Rally?

To recap, a number of financial measures or incentives were handed out by several countries yesterday. For instance:
- UK's £35 billion retail bank rescue funds for HBOS, Royal Bank of Scotland, Lloyds TSB and Barclays;

- A separate financial package included a £50 billion cash injection, guaranteeing interbank lending by £250 billion to help unfreeze wholesale markets, and extending a Bank of England scheme that swaps banks’ risky assets for government debt to provide £200 billion of cash to the system

- European central banks to temporarily guarantee inter-bank lending;

- Australia to fully guarantee all bank deposits

- Plans by U.S. Government to own stakes in U.S Banks;

According to Aaron Task, one should be cautioned the fact that there is still lack of a coordinated global policy response, and the U.S. continuing to lag other nations in taking the most dramatic steps like insuring all bank deposits and directly injecting capital into banks. Secondly, unemployment in U.S may hit 8.5% before the cycle turns. Last but not least, valuations tend to overshoot on the downside and bear markets historically don't end until P/E ratios hit single digits.

Here is a video report of the above discussion.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hi,

Thanks for leaving a comment on my blog.

I view this crisis as the buying opportunity of a lifetime. How are your investments going at the moment?

Malaysia Mortgage Broker said...

Hi Jeflin,

I agree with your view that this is indeed the buying opportunity of a life time, as never before in most of our present life time the global markets have tumbled so much and so deep during this on-going crisis!

I could still recall the financial crisis that Asia experienced about 10 years ago. Then was a similar crash, albeit for a different root cause. I personally know a number of smart investors who really profited handsomely from that crisis, and i am sure the same thing is going to happen again this time. It's really about being patient, and the ability to see off possibly wave after wave of tsunami effects!

However, i don't think we have seen the bottom of the crisis as yet.