Stock Market Hysteria

This is probably the only basketball blog where you'll see talk about the stock market but how can I avoid a subject that has been so entertaining this week. If this week's stock market activity was a basketball game, fans would be on the edge of their seats and several players would have already been ejected. As the game came closer to the end of the fourth quarter some of the more rowdy fans would be getting escorted out of the building by police and Za Za Gabor would be running around the stadium topless. Small children would be crying and some of the more sensitive fans would be tossing their cookies; desperation, heartbreak, pandemonium.

Seriously, this thing needs to be appreciated for the spectacle that it is. The way people tend to overreact and the old adage of how the individual is rational but a crowd is psychopathic certainly applies. People do things in groups that they would never do on their own. Personally I'm having a hard time understanding the rationale that mortgage problems have the power to bring down the whole market. But people seem to be eating this up. The media says it's so it must be so. It's like that with most things, isn't it?

Folks, check out the return of the stock market over the last five years. Now compare that to the declines we've seen this week. Now smack yourself upside the head for holding on so tightly to the silly notion that numbers are only supposed to go up, ever.

Ok I know this post is lost on the crowd that would actually expect something about basketball to be written on a blog titled "Basketball Chronicles" and I extend my apologies for that. If you are more concerned with basketball than with stock market hysteria, you are certainly in the more fortunate crowd. I won't make this posting so far off topic thing a habit, I promise.

So it looks like the market is declining again today. I'm gonna fuggedaboutit and go shoot some hoops.

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