it is also a reality that the most cash is often raised just after a low has printed in an index, as the index rises that cash pile is often lifted as price is seen as the best get-out likely to be achieved before the financial tsunami really kicks in
conversely managers are the most committed at the peak of a bull that's going to go on forever and those managers carry the least amount of cash, they buy every bargain fake dip as the index(es) go down
ASX200 has been in a bear market since 2007 and a probability of a new government if the index revisits recent weekly lows in the large upchannel but the index is not reliant on what politicians do, the opposite is true, politicians are reliant on what a bull market can do to keep them in power which answers the question how come Australia has had such a large PM turnover compared to New Zealand which has a far smaller population and smaller GDP - the answer is 'which part of the multi-centurial bull market are they in?' take a gander at the NZ50 for insight if you can find a chart that displays when the current decadal run began
i think the local election has been called because the timing is right to do it, but, timing in a new bull phase is fickle because a strong dip back to retest the low can coincide nicely with electorate being fed-up with more bad-news outlook, just a few weeks in a dipping bull is a mighty long time for a poorly-polling government, a price level can be set where we know the election will swing irrevocably
until both XAO and XJO make new altime highs we can consider we are still, technically, in a bear market that's "in a rally" - i think this is not the case and think we are well into the first major leg of a very strong uptrend that'll take several years to play out, each dip only serves to engender more fear about the unknown mostly because we are topical creatures affected by the topical-ness of media, whereas endogenous trends move on despite events, an endogenous trend is not reliant on suddent bullish events it is always ahead of those events, therefor, while people pile into cash for the next big calamity they are doing so on a guess work and sometimes that guess work will pay off but the truth is that when the crowd is the most ardent, the most committed to a story that hell-in-hand-basket is "so happening sometime next week or month or next quarter or next year"
that crowd is usually wrong - scared for the right reasons does not default to making making the right transactions
the stock market is an expression of fear or greed - the longer one has been in a market does not relate to that market it only allows that person to justify their reasoning, they express their fear thru emotive reasoning
it is also fair to say that as Australia has been in this dirth of a funk is so long (12 years !!) without a new altime high to cheer on, the 2003-2007 bull phase is all-but forgotten
our politicians are uptight as many in the population feel, we're surrounded by idiots in other governments in other countries, but, all of that was true in 1974 thru 1980
so the current period, democratic processes are eroded, it's all bad news, new uptrend fight thru the veil of bad news, pundits of the next hell-hole rationalise every dip as the start of the next big diving thing and then ignore the next higher high in the index or rationalize its the best price to exit at
it's the classic sign of exhaustion with dealing with a nurtured fear, the selling becomes less about actual pricing and more of the tiredness of dealing with the fear of all the doomy stuff
projecting ones fear of a bear into the future based on the past takes a lot of educated skill, however trends do not take skill, they only require a point of exhaustion and that point of exhaustion comes when the mass are on the wrong end of the swing and the mass has a peak opinion, the opinion is at a crescendo and sentiment is always dragged behind price, always has and always shall, peak pessimism at the bottom, peak optimism at the top
if there is a (paraphrasing) banker out there somewhere that has not rec'd any calls from his high-nett-worth clients and theyre in cash and he's advising staying cash and retail cfd's at averaging 85-90 short the sp200 its a pretty good signal there's a stampede going on to get out to stay out
its the inverse stampede you see at the top of a bull market, everyone is predicting more of the same thing only worse (bear) or better (bull)
i have never been convinced that investors set themselves into cash to cash in on the next major bull market, no, they set themselves in cash because they fear loss but they nearly always do this at the wrong end of the gig, they are attempting to forecast thru emotive logic
time, the only thing that cannot be bought or sold, only wasted