Understanding Economic Growth and Market Trends: Lessons from the Past (Full Transcript)

Speaker 1: Well, I've learned a lot of lessons over the years, and most of them the hard way. But there are a couple of basic facts. If you look at the economy, it grows over time. Not at a steady rate, but it grows over time. And markets, particularly the stock market, reflects that. In other words, if you have the economy growing at, let's say, the nominal economy, nominal GDP growing at 4%, long-term, corporate profits are going to grow about the same rate. Obviously, they can't continually expand faster than the economy or decline relative to the economy. So that's where you start. So in terms of stocks, the only real difference between how the nominal economy is going and how the stock market is going is price-earnings ratios. And they move in long cycles. 10, 15 years, they move up, then they tend to move down. And that's pretty much it. Now, that's the overall economy, and that's the overall investment. Of course, everybody thinks they're going to beat this. There's that great gambling instinct in all of us. I mean, that's why people watch financial news programs. That's why they're watching us. Everybody's trying to get a leg up here. Well, of course, everybody can't win at this game. I mean, on average, it's going to average out. But there is that hope that springs eternal within the human breast, as somebody once said, that you're going to be ahead of the game. Now, what that means is if you are trying to beat the game, you've got to be against the consensus. It doesn't mean that you simply are a contrarian in the sense that whatever the consensus says, I'm going to take the opposite side. No, no, because consensus can be right, and often is. But what it means is that when you come up with an idea, and it is contrary to the consensus, you think it's got a good chance of happening, and it's a trend that's working, then that's where you want to really jump on it with all force. That's what we did in the early 2000s. We saw as early as 2002 what looked like a developing housing bubble. And so we said, you know, this isn't ready to crack yet, but it looks like it's getting there. We had people who were putting nothing down on houses. They assumed that the appreciation would be such they'd never even have to make one monthly payment because they could refinance. You had the no-doc loans, all this nonsense. And it really was clear. Now, obviously, that bubble would not have developed and not break until really the end of 2007 unless everybody or most people were convinced it was going to last forever. So there's a case of where you had an extreme situation. It was against all reality in terms of how long it could last, and it was one of these rare opportunities where going against a trend with a major bubble having developed where you could make some serious money.