The Bull Market is now 5 years old and some people want you to believe that it is going to continue for a while yet to come.  The S&P 500 if up 177% since March of 2009 where it hit its low during the Great Recession and some are thinking that it will go up another 20% comparing it to the Bull Market of 1982 to 1987.  I don’t know about you, but I was alive during that Bull Market of 82 to 87, I was actually going to college at the University of Pittsburgh at the time.  I can tell you that the world was very different then.  My friends were graduating college and jumping into middle management jobs with major corporations, walking around with that big brick of a cell phone and everyone was driving a Porsche 944 turbo.  Well maybe not everyone, but I don’t remember my friends saying that they are moving home with their parents because they can’t find a job, or working at the mall just to make ends meet.

The continuance of the Bull Market is coming at a cost like none that I have seen in my lifetime.  The media will tell you that there is no inflation to worry about.  I guess they don’t go to the grocery store or put gas in their car.  I have read articles that people have no money left at the end of the month to save for retirement and the average 401K balance is $10,000.  If things are so great why are we all not feeling it? I can’t remember a time when the price of goods actually went down and things became more reasonable.  Even during the Great Recession the only thing that went down was the value of your home, where you had you equity stripped from you and got to take it on the chin.

Jeffrey Kleintop, chief market strategist for LPL Financial says that the market will continue to go up because of all the people on the side lines jumping back in and this Bull Market could last another 10 years.  However that reminds me of a quote from Warren Buffet, “Be fearful when others are greedy and greedy when others are fearful.”  So what if Buffet is right and the people on Wall Street and in the media are wrong and the Bull Market ends, and the market experiences a major pull back?  I am not a market predictor but if I was up a over 175% in my portfolio over the past 5 years.  I would probably take some of my winnings and put it in an annuity, which is contractually guaranteed not to lose money in the event of a market pull back.

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