Ken Fisher Details Why Today’s Investor Headline Fears Are Bullish for Stocks

Title screen appears, “Ken Fisher Details Why Today’s Headline Fears Are Bullish for Stocks.”

A man appears on the screen wearing a navy suit, sitting 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: There have been a lot of increased fears just lately. Fears about all kinds of things, whether it's tensions with China, whether it's energy prices, whether it's fears of inflation and rising potential long term interest rates, whether it's fears about American. Political and legislative issues. Some people want these. Some people hate these. You've got concerns that the economy is slowing down. You've got you've got you've got.

Ken Fisher: And a long time ago I wrote a Forbes column that I call the Frito Meter. And basically, I made the point that when you see lots and lots and lots and lots of things that suddenly start going, bing, bing, bing, we're afraid of this. We're afraid of that. We're afraid of the other. That these are signs of sentiment cooling from a sentiment that been a little too overly optimistic and that these things no. One of which is actually overwhelmingly huge, but all of which make people feel like they're up against a wall of ping pong. Ping pong, ping.

Ken Fisher: Lead us to a world that takes away almost any form of what had previously been a concern, which is are we moving toward euphoria and expectations that are so high that no reasonable set of realities could possibly live up to those expectations? But the pinging of the Freddo meter is a sign that those have gone away, dropping sentiment down into levels that today we can measure in lots of ways, including some formal sentiment indexes that take you back down to the lower end of the spectrum of optimism, as lots of you have heard me say over and over and over again over the decades.

Ken Fisher: Legendary, deceased now wonderful man, Sir John Templeton, legendary investor who by happenstance I shared his birthday just a different year after he had it first. So, John, you would say bull markets are born on pessimism, grow on skepticism, mature on optimism and die of euphoria. And that's almost always true, except for some rare occasions when it's not. And once you get up into that higher level of optimism, it tends to limit the upside potential to the market.

Ken Fisher: But when you get all of these kind of Frito meta type concerns, bringing sentiment back down to the lower level of optimism, it provides another leg to the bull market and a fair amount of time. And that's an optimistic thing that people don't recognize at the time as optimistic. Most all these fears are ones that are widely bandied, very well known, and people can rarely accept in their bones that markets pre price all widely known information, fears, opinions, etc. and that feature.

Ken Fisher: Of that Prix pricing applies to almost every one of these. Some of them are actually false fears. Things where you should think about on the other way around. You can look up on a Google search or whatever and see. I've written a lot of things about why quantitative easing is regularly seen upside down and backwards, and the end of quantitative easing is a good thing, not a bad thing, and is actually something that would help buoy the world. But people have some little fears of the tapering of quantitative easing.

Ken Fisher: That concept is that fear is a false factor. Fear of false factor is always, always, always bullish. So basically, pretty much all these things, as near as I can tell, are either ones that are very widely priced. And bringing down sentiment which is bullish or fearful factor, which is doubly bullish. And therefore this process where we've seen sentiment drop is actually a really good thing for stocks looking forward. Thank you for listening.

A series of disclosures appears on the screen: “Investing in 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 Investments 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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