Guess Who’s Ruining the Stock Market?

Today, in “maybe every opinion doesn’t need to be shared,” we have a MarketWatch op-ed titled “The masses are going all-in for stocks, and that’s not a good thing:”

For years, average Americans have sat on the sidelines. Many had been burned badly by the dot.com crash and the housing bust during the 2000s. Many simply didn’t have the money to invest the way finger-wagging pundits like me said they should.

Awww, poor average Americans! (Literally.) But now more of us are investing, which should be a good thing, right?

[…] after 8 ½ years and a 270% gain in the S&P 500 Index from its March 2009 lows, the market’s many doubters have thrown in the towel. As prominent market technician Ron Meisels told this column in May, that’s a sign the bull market is in its last innings.

In other words, the more people invest in a bull market, the more likely the market is to turn bearish. (The bear’s the bad one.)

I have no idea whether this theory holds up, but I do know that I’ve been sharing “the stock market is going to drop any day now” articles since… huh, November 2016. Previous experts have attributed it to our current Era of Uncertainty, or to the fact that stock prices are too high, but this particular expert has decided it’s because of all of us average Americans have now gotten into the market—even though that’s exactly what he told us to do back when we couldn’t afford to do it!

Look, I know, buy low sell high and all of that. But some of us couldn’t buy low because we were too busy having no job and losing our homes, and now that we want a piece of the economic growth, we’ve got this guy finger-wagging at us that we’re going to ruin everything.

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