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There's rather a lot of things like the ones you mention which give cause for concern. Housing, energy, capital investment and so on all point the same way really.

We've got some serious problems in the Australian economy with distortions, hollowing out and things stretched to ridiculous extremes and I think the performance of the ASX is sounding a warning of that.

Does anyone seriously think we can continue down this path? Entire industries wiped out, high costs for practically anything and a huge reliance on ever increasing house prices. Something's got to give surely?

I take a look at longer term (10+ year) charts of a lot of stocks which I identify based on fundamental factors. Suffice to say there's an awful lot that have never come anywhere close to recovering from the GFC in terms of the stock price. It's not the odd random company here and there, if you start just bringing up long term charts and taking a look at them then you'll find there's plenty in that situation. The fundamentals of some of them don't look too bad but the stock prices are another story. Take out banks (which are somewhat tied to housing) and resources and there's not a lot holding up the index so far as I can tell.