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[pandy]

I worked on the floor of the NYSE in '74. I started towards the end of the bear market which saw the Dow it 577! My dad was a broker working out of an office in Flushing, NY.

I eventually got a job as an order clerk, but my first job, which only lasted a month or so, was as a page, where you walk the floor taking orders back and forth to different specialists. I don't know if that's the way they do it now, but back then, the order clerk got the order over the phone and handed it to a broker, who then either delivered it to the Specialist (Specialists hold the book on a stock and set the buy and sell prices), or handed it off to a page who would deliver it to the Specialist.

I thought that you could get a much better feel for the market on the floor than in an office. I remember telling my Dad that the sentiment among the brokers on the floor was that the end of the bear market was imminent. I would hear them saying things like, "There are so may bargains....Next year is going to be a good one."

Sure enough, the market bottomed out in December and started to go up, and it went up 48% in the next five months. And the big money was loaded up for it, believe me. The rich got richer, as usual.

Predicting the end of a bull market is tougher. You have to watch for wild speculation. When the dot com bubble burst, for instance, biotech companies had recently emerged and they were the hot thing, and stock prices on some of the biotech were jumping 60 points in a day, and plummeting just as fast. People who weren't normally in the market were suddenly trading. My dad told me, "there's wild speculation, the bull market is going to end soon."

Same thing happened in the real estate bubble, people were "flipping houses" like crazy towards the end. When it looks like easy money, it's about to collapse.

I don't see wild speculation right now, except for in some of the crypto currencies, which could be a warning sign. But the market is different now because so much of the corporate profits come from overseas, it makes it harder to get a feel for the market. The key is, how much of the Trump rally was in anticipation of the tax relief and the cutting of regulations?

Still, corporate profits dictate the market and profits are going to be good this year.