This article was originally published in The Option Strategist Newsletter Volume 16, No. 5 on March 9, 2007.
One of the things that one hears from “old-timers” when the market declines sharply as it has recently, is that money managers are so young they’ve never seen something like this before. Personally, I don’t buy that. You can’t tell me that the hedge funds and large institutional money managers don’t have someone in a supervisory or risk control role that isn’t at least old enough to have seen the 2000-2002 bear market, the October 1997 and October 1998 mini-bear markets, and probably even the Crash of ‘87. At the very least, they saw the correction in May-June, 2006. I think what prompts “old-timers” to say such things is that each time the market peaks before one of these sharp corrections, it seems that these big money managers are buying with total abandon – as if they don’t remember the lessons of the past. And that may be true. Perhaps these money managers were operating during past corrections, but they think this time “it will be different.”
