Fisher Investments’ Founder, Ken Fisher, Compares Market Parallels Between 1967 and 2023

Title screen appears, “Fisher Investments’ Founder, Ken Fisher, Compares Market Parallels Between 1967 and 2023”

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A man appears on the screen wearing a navy suit, sitting in an office in front of a fireplace.

He begins to speak.

A banner identifies him as Ken Fisher, Executive Chairman and Co-Chief Investment Officer, Fisher Investments.

Ken Fisher doing hand gestures time to time explaining.

Ken Fisher: So, I know I'm old, you know, septuagenarians just might see things a little differently than younger people, But I was there.

Now they say that if you were there

and you remember, you weren't really there.

And I'm talking about San Francisco go in 1966, and people ask me pretty regularly, you wrote these columns like my Christmas Day column in the New York Post, which any of you can access, It's not behind a paywall.

I just go to the New York Post website and look for the columnist and look up me and look at my Christmas Day column detailing why 2022 was so much like 1966, and therefore extrapolating, that 2023 ought to be like 1967.

Ken Fisher: So far, that's worked pretty well.

But if you weren't there, you kind of don't get it.

I mean first, the world was still the world. US markets correlated with non-US markets.

All that's been a constant. The US

was the biggest economy, more so

than now, relative to the world.

But at the time, there was

another regional war, and the US

spent money on that.

Other countries, not so much, a few.

That's very parallel to what's going

on with Ukraine, just different players.

Ken Fisher: We were a bit, after a presidential election, about the same amount of time. The

President then Lyndon Johnson was thought to be a moderating force when he was elected.

But by 1966, there was the beginning of protests and hostility tied to the Vietnamese war and the aftermath of the spending associated with the Great Society, which in some ways is periled spending associated with the COVID phenomena.

Because if you look at a lot of that spending, like a lot of the infrastructure spending, it wasn't spent on infrastructure, it was spent on social stuff.

Ken Fisher: Then, too, you had a sudden rise in short term interest rates in the United States and around the world.

Tied to what?

Oh, yeah, fighting off inflation.

Now, mind you, it wasn't as big as in

2022, but up to that point, relative to what the Fed had done, it was big.

Ken Fisher: Then two, you had people saying in media, if you go back and study that we can't have a market bottom because we haven't had capitulation.

You remember people saying that in 2022?

But the market which in 1966 had peaked in the first week in January and bottomed in the second week of October parallel almost perfectly what happened in 2022, where we got a bottom in October without capitulation.

If you think through categories that

did well, they're not terribly dissimilar.

Ken Fisher: And then remember another killer. Early in 1966, because of what the Fed was doing and other central banks, there was a general widespread fear of recession.

And the recession was thought to be maybe already here, as was the case in the middle of 2022, after the first and second quarters had slightly hair whisker negative GDP shift.

Remember, GDP is not that precise.

So, shifts as small as occurred in the first and second quarter, which are mostly driven by inventory,

should not be actually taken very seriously, and don't normally get turned into what's called technically, after the fact, a recession, as determined by the formal powers that be that determine those things, typically a couple of years later.

But people generally thought, in

2022 we got a recession.

The recession didn't come, economy grew in the third and fourth quarters, and people are still somewhat worried about recession.

The same thing happened in 1966.

Ken Fisher: 1967 was a robust stock market. It was the year that was famous in San Francisco, where I was raised as the “summer of love”.

It really wasn't a summer of love.

It was the period of, if you're coming

to San Francisco, be sure to wear some flowers in your hair and all that nonsense, That's true.

Ken Fisher: But it was also serious war protests.

It was also serious beginnings of the hostility associated with moving to the 68 presidential election, which you probably see this year, doesn't stop stock market and the period epitomized to a large extent by parts of the movie Forrest Gump with the hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today? This is really the first time that we had that kind of hostility against a President of the United States, parallel to the degree to which were polarized today.

A lot of people will tell you, and I believe it's true because I was there, that that period, 66, 67 into 68 is the first time that America becomes so heavily polarized with so little in the middle and so much on both sides like we are now.

Ken Fisher: So, I just put all that out there, and there's more that you think about as parallels as to why, because 2022 was so much like 1966, the closest two years I can find ever in history, that 2023 ought to be a lot like 1967.

And with that, you should be happy, even though there'll be lots of things in the year that aren't happy.

I hope you have a happy year when it comes to stocks.

Thank you for listening to me.

Ken Fisher finished talking, and a white screen appears with a title “Fisher Investments” underneath it is the red YouTube subscribe button.

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A series of disclosures appears on screen: “Investing is Securities involves a risk of loss. Past performance is never a guarantee of future returns. Investing in foreign stock markets involves additional risks, such as the risk of currency fluctuations. The foregoing constitutes the general views of Fisher Investments and should not be regarded as personalized investment advice or a reflection of the performance of fisher investment or its clients. Nothing herein is intended to be a recommendation or a forecast of market conditions. Rather it is intended to illustrate a point. Current and future markets may differ significantly from those illustrated here. Not all past forecasts were, nor future forecasts may be, as accurate as those predicted herein.

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