Is it back to the Fifties?

By John Authers
My mother is 75," said Jon Stewart, the US late-night comedian, at the end of his already famous interview with Jim Cramer, the television stock market pundit. "And she bought into the idea that long-term investing is the way to go. And guess what?"
"It didn't work," replied Mr Cramer.
The interview this month, in which Mr Stewart humiliated his guest, has earned a place in American cultural history. Mr Stewart was articulating a broad sense of betrayal among the populace that the faith all had been told to put in equities had been misplaced.
That loss of faith spreads beyond retail investors. The crash has forced professional investors and academics to question the theoretical underpinnings of modern finance. The most basic assumptions of the investment industry, and the products they offer to the public, must be reconsidered from scratch. Indeed, the very reason for the industry to exist - a belief that experts make the smartest decisions on where people's money will do best - is up for scrutiny as a result.
Mr Stewart was right about long-term investment, and not just for septuagenarians. US stocks have fallen more than 60 per cent in real terms since the market peaked in 2000. Anyone who started saving 40 years ago, when the postwar "baby boom" generation was just joining the workforce, has found that stocks have performed no better than 20-year government bonds since then, a forthcoming article by Robert Arnott for the Journal of Indexes shows. These people want to retire soon and the "cult of the equity" has let them down.
To find a period that does produce an outperformance requires a span reaching back a lot further. The 2009 Credit Suisse Global Investment Returns Yearbook shows that since 1900 US stocks have averaged an annual real return of 6 per cent, compared with 2.1 per cent for bonds - while in the UK, equities have beaten gilts with a return of 5.1 per cent against 1.4 per cent. The problem is that they can perform worse than bonds for periods longer than a human working lifetime.
Further, recent experience challenges that basis of modern finance, the "efficient markets hypothesis", which in its strongest form holds that prices of securities always reflect all known information. This implies that stocks will react to each new piece of information, yet without following any set trend - a description that cannot be applied to the events of the past 18 months. On these foundations, theorists worked out ways to measure risk, to put a price on options and other derivatives and to maximise returns for a given level of risk.
This theory also showed that stocks would outperform in the long run. Stocks are riskier than asset classes such as government bonds (which have a state guarantee), corporate bonds (which have a superior claim on a company's resources) or cash. So the argument was that those who invested in them would in the long run be paid for taking this risk by receiving a higher return. That is now in question.
"There's no such thing as a risk that you get paid for taking. The whole point about risk is that you don't know if you're going to be paid for it or not," says Robert Jaeger at BNY Mellon Asset Management. "What's important about the current period is that now it's true even for a very long period [that] people haven't been paid for taking equity risks. These losses were taken by people who didn't even think they were taking a risk."
"It supposedly didn't matter how long you waited. But the notion that the long run will bail you out no matter what stupid things you do in the short run I think is dead," says Robert Arnott, who examines such performance in a forthcoming article for the Journal of Indexes. "And the notion that if you have the better asset class it doesn't matter what you pay for it is on its deathbed."
Instead, the cult of the equity and the efficient markets hypothesis begin to look like phenomena born of the uniquely positive conditions in the middle of the last century. For decades until 1959, the yield paid out in dividends on stocks was higher than the yield paid out by bonds. This was to compensate investors for the extra risk involved in buying equities. In 1951, as the building blocks of the efficientmarkets theory began to appear in academic journals, US stocks yielded as much as 7 per cent, compared with only 2 per cent on bonds.
"The 1950s marked the start of a period of relative peace and prosperity. It came on the heels of a tumultuous 50 years that included two world wars and an economic depression. In hindsight, the case for equities over bonds was especially compelling in the early 1950s," says Robert Buckland, chief global equity strategist for Citigroup.
So in 1959, the yield on stocks dipped below the yield on bonds - and stayed there for almost half a century until the two crossed once more last November. The theory changed to account for this and came to hold that bonds yielded more to recognise the superior long-term growth potential of equities.
That growth potential made pension funds boost their allocations to equities. In the US, and later elsewhere, legislation gave individual investors more power over their retirement funds but also required them to take on the risks. As employers were no longer guaranteeing them a proportion of their final salary on retirement. Savers' money went heavily into equities. Then came the bear market of this decade.
If that bear market has damaged the case for stocks, the efficient markets hypothesis underlying it had been "dying a natural death for most of this decade", according to Mr Arnott. In place of the standard assumption that all decisions are rational, behavioural economists began substituting findings from experimental psychology on how people actually make decisions. This helped to explain market crashes and bubbles, showed that investment decisions could be systematically irrational and led to attempts to create new models of how markets set prices.
Efficient-markets theorists themselves moved away from the hardest version of the theory. They identified two anomalies: in the long run, small companies tend to outperform the larger, while cheap or "value" stocks (which have a low price in relation to their earnings or the book value on their balance sheet) outperform more expensive stocks.
Burton Malkiel, a Princeton economics professor whose book, A Random Walk Down Wall Street , is the most famous statement of efficient-markets theory, suggests its strongest form is a straw man. " 'Efficient markets' has never meant to me that the price is always right," he says. "The price clearly isn't right. We know markets overreact. They get irrationally exuberant and they get irrationally pessimistic." But he says that the key implications remain intact. "What 'efficient markets' says is that there are no easy opportunities for riskless profit. There I still would hold that that part of the efficient markets is alive and well."
Still, the search is on for a new theory to replace efficient markets. Perhaps most prominently, Andrew Lo, head of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Financial Innovation Laboratory, has merged behavioural and efficient markets theory using Darwinian biology.
In his "adaptive markets hypothesis", markets behave efficiently during periods of calm. "Periods of extraordinary prosperity have behavioural effects - it gives us a false sense of security and therefore there is too much risk-taking. Eventually that kind of risk-taking is unsustainable and you get a burst of the bubble."
Once bubbles burst, Mr Lo's theory predicts, a period of "punctuated equilibrium" will ensue, in which longengrained behaviours no longer work. "We just had a meteorite hit us in financial markets. There will be destruction of species that have lasted a very long time. Out of the chaos will emerge new species."
Most clearly, the lightly regulated hedge fund industry - described by Mr Lo as the Galapagos of financial services - is suffering a shake-out. The sector as a whole suffered an average loss of 18.3 per cent last year, only its second losing year since 1990, according to Hedge Fund Research of Chicago. This prompted investors to pull $155bn (€115bn, £105bn) out of the funds. But the worst performing 10 per cent lost an average of 62 per cent, while the top decile gained 40 per cent. The Darwinian process is well advanced: 1,471 hedge funds were liquidated last year, while only 659 new ones were launched, the lowest figure since 2000.
The traditional mutual fund, in which managers run a portfolio of about 100 stocks and attempt to beat a benchmark index, may be another casualty. Last year, most equity mutual funds failed to beat their benchmark indices, even though their managers had the freedom to move into cash and to pick stocks. Mr Malkiel points out that of the 14 funds that had beaten the market in the nine years to 2008, only one did so last year. Both efficientmarkets and behavioural economists say it is better just to match the index, with a tracking fund, and avoid the fees incurred in unsuccessful attempts to beat the market.
Index funds have caught on over the last two decades and, recently, their growth has been driven by exchange-traded funds - index funds that can be bought and sold directly on an exchange. Mutual funds saw global net sales of $112bn last year but ETFs pulled in a net $268bn, according to Strategic Insight, a New York consultancy. Barclays Global Investors reckons there are plans to launch another 679 ETFs around the world.
Index funds could become building blocks for new retirement savings products that may look much like the pensions that were the norm until confidence in equity investing took over. As it may be politically infeasible to continue to expect savers to bear all the investment risk, some benefits may have to be guaranteed.
Mr Lo suggests that all these developments are consistent with a new world in which investments will largely be controlled by "herbivores" - funds that passively aim to match benchmark indices for a range of asset classes that goes beyond equities. This leaves room for a smaller group of "carnivores" to try to beat the market by exploiting inefficiencies and anomalies.
Those carnivores will, moreover, be putting much less trust in theoretical models. As Mr Jaeger says: "Even with all those quantitative models, ultimately you have to make a decision. Ideally, what you are left with is people doing that somewhat old-fashioned kind of investing where you try to figure things out for yourself."
'I haven't opened a statement for months: there's no point in depressing myself'
Christina Read is 61 and, at least on paper, has lost half her life's savings in the past year. "I started last year with about $400,000 - it's down to I think about $200,000 now," says the former dancer who now works as a nanny in Manhattan.
For Ms Read, who is divorced with two college-age children, the loss means giving up her dream of a house in the country. "I had been thinking of an old farm, maybe in Nova Scotia. Now it is pretty much impossible."
But she is retaining the investments that have performed so poorly: "I will continue working, I have to keep money coming in now and, if the market doesn't come back in the next 10 years, I will give up on having anything for myself - I will just leave it to my children."
It is this kind of stoicism that has the army of brokers, wealth managers, fund managers and product marketers who grew rich during the boom hoping individual investors will get back into the markets, and soon. Unless they do, the industry's outlook will be dire. Retail investors, mainly through mutual funds, own a much larger part of the stock and bond markets than ever before. Bob Reynolds, chief executive of Putnam Investments, says: "It started out with 401(k)s [individual retirement accounts]. There are more mutual funds than stocks. We are an investor society."
Will it stay that way? Ms Read may have sat tight but hers was not the only response to the world-shaking events. In the biggest ever exodus of money from professional management, Americans pulled a net $320bn (£218bn, €237bn) from mutual funds last year. They shifted into cash, ploughing a net $422bn into money market funds during the year. A net $212bn went into bank deposits - a figure that has since risen further, to $370bn for the 12 months to mid-March.
Elbowing aside their advisers, some began trading their stocks themselves, sharply lifting retail trading volumes as they tried to take control of their investments. Others have done nothing, but for different reasons than Ms Read. Hearing the bad news, they have simply refused to open their financial statements.
"I haven't opened a statement since October," says one Los Angeles-based business owner, who adds that his holdings were worth more than $3m at the end of 2007 but declines to estimate their value now. "I know it's bad, but what can I do about it? There is no point in depressing myself. I need to focus on my business, which is going well. My investments are probably pretty much gone . . . I had a lot of stocks - bank stocks, Bear Stearns, they're gone. I see the statements come in the mail and I throw them right in the garbage."
George Gatch, chief executive of JPMorgan Funds, an arm of JPMorgan Chase, is working to re-engage with such investors. "We know how scared people are and we are trying to convince people to get back in, sit down and talk to their financial advisers," he says. The 50,000 advisers with whom JPMorgan works are reporting that "it is very hard to get their clients to consider the steps they should take, to do a formal review of their portfolio . . . There is a base of Americans that don't want to look at their statements any more."
More than 90m Americans own stocks, through mutual funds and 401(k) plans. But Mr Reynolds adds: "There is a tremendous amount of cash on the sidelines today. Retail investors have close to $13,000bn sitting in money market funds and bank deposits. A year ago there was $7,000bn. That is billions that is just waiting to come back again."
In other words, retail investors have the wherewithal to get things working. The question is whether they will. "The demographics and people's objectives haven't changed because of the market," says Mr Reynolds. But, like others, he sees a shift to more conservative investing.
Independent financial advisers who work outside the big brokerage firms tend to be more pessimistic.
"Once the money gets under the mattress, which it has, it takes a long time to pry it out again," says one.
If individual investors stay away, the consequences for the lucrative wealth management industry and its associated services and advisers are considerable. Wealth management is seen as a stable source of revenue for the Wall Street banks as they restructure themselves for a new era.
For instance, Citigroup and Morgan Stanley are merging their wealth management operations, which will result in an army of more than 20,000 brokers to compete with Bank of America's new "thundering herd", previously part of Merrill Lynch.
Jim McCaughan, chief executive of Principal Global Investors, an asset manager, says he does not see a shift away from using brokers or advisers: "Fear tends to lead people to want to talk to someone. They will go to the advisers and brokers: that is what has happened in past bear markets."
First, however, investors will need to start looking at their financial statements again.
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熊市•牛市•股市
作者：英国《金融时报》约翰·奥瑟兹(John Authers)
美国午夜节目主持人乔恩•斯图尔特(Jon Stewart)对电视股评家吉姆•克莱默(Jim Cramer)的采访非常有名。在末尾，克莱默说：“我母亲75岁了。她认同长期投资是正道的观点。你猜这么着？”
“这招不管用，”克莱默先生回答。
发生在本月的这次采访已经在美国文化历史中获得了一席之地。在采访中，斯图尔特先生让他的嘉宾当众出了洋相。他就是在清晰地向众人表明，百姓之间有一种普遍背叛感，即当初他们被灌输的对股票的信仰是错误的。
信仰的丧失不仅仅体现在散户中。这次金融危机迫使一些职业投资者和专家学者质疑当代金融的理论基础。投资行业最基本的假设，以及他们向公众提供的产品，都必须彻底重新考虑一下。实际上，这个行业存在下去的理由——专家会为投资者的资金如何产生最大效益做出最明智决定的信念——最终还有待推敲。
斯图尔特先生对于长期投资的看法是正确的，而且不仅仅对于70岁以上的老人是这样。美国股市自2000年见顶以来实际下跌幅度超过60%。罗伯特•阿诺特(Robert Arnott)为《Journal of Indexes》写的一篇即将发表的文章表明，40年前，当在战后“婴儿潮”时期出生的那一代人的工作刚起步时，那些开始存钱的人到现在却发现股票自那时起的表现就一直没有超过20年期政府债券。这些人希望早点退休，“股票崇拜”让他们大失所望。
要找到一个拥有超额市场收益的时间段，还需要把时间跨度拉得更长。据《2009年瑞士信贷全球投资回报年鉴》显示，自1900年以来，美国股市的实际平均年回报率为6%，债券的实际平均年回报率为2.1%——而在英国，股市的表现也以5.1%比1.4%的回报率战胜了债券。问题是，较之于债券，股市表现差的时间，可以比一个人的工作年限更长。
此外，最近发生的事情对当代金融基础，即“有效市场假说”发起了挑战。这种假说在其最可信时认为，证券的价格能反映所有已知信息。这意味着，股票价格将对每条新信息做出反应，而不会追随任何既定趋势——这种描述却不适用于过去18个月所发生的事情。根据这些基础，理论学家研究出了衡量风险的方法，制定期权和其它衍生品价格的方法，以及在一个特定的风险水平上使回报最大化的方法。
这一理论也表明，股票市场的长期表现将会胜出。股票比政府债券（有国家担保）、公司债券（债券持有人有获取公司资源的优先权利）和现金等其他资产类别的风险更大。因此结论是，从长远来看，那些因投资股市而承担了风险的投资者最终会得到更高的回报。而现在，这一观点受到了质疑。
“世界上没有哪种风险在你承担之后能为此得到回报。对风险的正确理解是，当你承担了风险之后，你不知道是否会得到回报。”纽约银行梅隆资产管理公司(BNY Mellon Asset Management)的罗伯特•耶格(Robert Jaeger)说，“当前，重要的一点是，人们遇到了这样一个现实：即便在相当长的一段时间内，他们也没有因承担了股票风险而获得回报。有人承担了这些损失，而蒙受了损失的人们甚至不认为自己承担了风险。”
“通常，你等多久并不重要。但有种观点我认为已经被颠覆了，就是无论你在短期内犯了什么愚蠢的错误，只要你长期坚持下去，你终究会得到拯救。”罗伯特•阿诺特表示，他在一篇写给《Journal of Indexes》的即将发表的文章中，对这种表现做了检验。他说，“而另外一个观点，即如果你有更好的资产类别，那么你为之花什么代价并不重要，也已被判死刑。”
与之相反，股票崇拜以及有效市场假说，同上世纪中期那个独一无二有利环境里出现的景象似乎颇为契合。在直至1959年的十几年里，股票分红所得的收益要高于债券的收益。这是为了补偿投资者购买股票所承担的额外风险。1951年，有效市场理论的雏形开始出现在学术期刊上，较之于债券区区2%的收益，美国股市的收益高达7%。
“上世纪50年代标志着一段相对和平和繁荣时期的开始。这是经历了喧嚣动乱的50年才迎来的，期间包括两次世界大战和一次经济萧条。现在看来，在上世纪50年代早期，股市表现好于债券的理由特别有说服力。”花旗银行首席全球股票战略家罗伯特•巴克兰德(Robert Buckland)说。
到了1959年，股市的收益开始低于债券的收益——而且这样的状态一直持续了将近半个世纪，直到去年11月两者再次相交。为了解释这种现象，理论发生了改变，认为债券有更大的收益是为了确认股票卓越的长期增长潜力。
这种增长潜力使养老基金增加了其投资股市的资金配额。在美国，接着在之后的其它地方，法律给予个体投资者更多掌控其养老基金的权利，但同时还要他们承担风险。由于雇主们不再保证员工退休工资的最终比例，储户的钱都源源不断地流入股市。接着就迎来了最近十年的熊市。
阿诺特先生称，如果说熊市破坏了支持股票的理由，那么支持股市的有效市场理论在这十年的多数时间里已经“自然死亡”。为了代替这一基于“所有决定都是理性的”标准假设，行为经济学家拿出了有关“人事实上是如何做决定”的实验心理学研究结果。这有助于解释市场崩溃和市场泡沫，表明投资决定有可能是一贯不理智的，并且导致人们试图对市场如何定价创造出的新模式。
有效市场理论家们自己也不得不对这一理论的最严格版本进行修改。他们发现了两个反常现象：长期来看，小公司的股票表现往往要比大公司的好，而廉价即“价值型”股票（指价格相对于收益或资产负债表上的账面价值而言较低的股票）比那些价格更高的股票表现更好。
普林斯顿大学经济学教授伯顿•麦基尔(Burton Malkiel)的著作《漫游华尔街》(A Random Walk Down Wall Street)是有效市场理论最著名的演绎。他表示，该理论在其最可信时是站不住脚的。“对我来说，‘有效市场'从来不是说价格永远是适当的。”他说，“现在的价格不适当，我们知道市场会反应过度。有时价格非理性地虚高，有时它们则变得非理性地悲观。”但他表示，有效市场理论的关键要点仍然没变。“‘有效市场'所说的是，不存在获得无风险利润的轻松机会。因此，我仍坚持认为，有效市场理论的这一部分说法是有效的，并且说得通。”
但是，取代有效市场理论的全新理论研究已经开启。或许，最突出的是，麻省理工学院金融创新实验室(Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Financial Innovation Laboratory)的负责人罗闻全(Andrew Lo)利用达尔文生物论，已经将行为理论和有效市场理论结合起来了。
在他的“适应性市场假说”中，市场在平稳时期表现有效。“特别繁荣时期会产生行为效应——它会给我们一种错误的安全感，因此就会有很多人冒险。最终，这种冒险难以为继，就发生了泡沫的破裂。”
罗闻全的理论预测，泡沫一旦破裂，接着就会产生一个“间断平衡”期，在这一时期，长期以来根深蒂固的行为将不再有效。“我们的金融市场刚刚遭受了一块陨石的撞击。存在了很长时间的物种将被毁灭。新的物种将在这一混乱时期出现。”
最明显的是，监管不是很严的对冲基金业——被罗先生描述为“金融服务业的加拉帕斯群岛”——正在遭受一场震荡。芝加哥对冲基金研究机构(Hedge Fund Research of Chicago)的数据显示，整个行业在去年平均亏损了18.3%，而这仅仅是自1900年以来第二次出现亏损。这使得投资者从各大基金中撤走了1550亿美元（合1150亿欧元、1050亿英镑）的资金。表现最差的10%对冲基金平均损失达62%，而表现最好的前十只对冲基金却获得了40%的收益。用达尔文的进化论来解释很顺利：去年，共有1471家对冲基金被清盘，而新推出的基金只有659家，是自2000年以来的最低水平。
传统共同基金经理管理着约100只股票组成的投资组合，并尝试着使基金回报率超过基准指数。而现在，这种基金有可能成为下一个受害者。去年，多数股票型共同基金的回报率未能超过他们的基准指数，即便基金经理有权去持币和选股。麦基尔先生指出，在截至2008年的9年里表现一直跑赢大市的14只基金中，只有一只基金在去年胜过了大市。有效市场理论和行为经济学家都认为，较好的做法是，仅仅用指数基金跟踪对比指数，同时避免为跑赢大市而做的不成功尝试所产生的费用。
在过去的20年间，指数基金开始流行，而最近，交易所交易基金（ETF，一种能够在交易所直接买卖的指数基金）推动了指数基金的增长。根据纽约咨询机构Strategic Insight的数据，去年，共同基金的全球净销售额为1120亿美元，而ETF基金的净销售额则达到了2680亿美元。据巴克莱全球国际投资管理(Barclays Global Investors)的统计，全球范围共有679只交易所交易基金正准备推出。
指数基金可能成为新型退休储蓄产品的材料，这些产品看上去很像退休基金，而在人们对股市的信心取而代之前，退休基金一度是惯常做法。由于继续指望储户承担所有投资风险在政治上不可行，因此必须保证一定的收益。
罗先生表示，所有的这些发展必须和一个新的世界相符合，在这个新的世界中，大部分投资由“食草动物”控制。“食草动物”是指一部分基金，他们被动地设定目标，试图使自身的业绩赶上包括股票在内一系列资产类别的基准指数。这为那些试图利用市场无效性和反常来跑赢大市的少数“食肉动物”留出了空间。
而且，那些“食肉动物”对理论模型的信仰程度更低。就像耶格先生所说的那样：“即使有量化的模型，最终你还是得做出决定。理想情况下，你面临的局面是，人们在做稍微有点过时的投资决定，而这个时候你设法作出自己的投资决策。”
“我已经有几个月没有看过一份投资财务报告了：何必搞坏自己的心情。”
克里斯蒂娜•里德(Christina Read)今年61岁，在过去的1年里，她至少在账面上损失了她生平储蓄的一半之多。“去年开始的时候我有大约40万美元，到现在，我估计现在已经缩水到20万美元左右了。”这位前舞蹈演员说道。她如今在曼哈顿当保姆。
里德女士和她两个上大学的孩子分居两地，对她来说，这个损失就意味着要放弃她在乡下拥有一栋房子的梦想。“我梦想拥有一座旧农场，或许就坐落于新斯科舍(Nova Scotia)。现在这个想法已经完全落空了。”
但她现在还是持有着那些表现糟糕的投资。“我会继续工作，现在我必须要保持收入来源。如果市场在未来的10年内还是未能恢复，我将放弃我的一切——我会把它留给我的孩子们。”
现在，一大批股票经纪人、理财经理、基金经理以及产品营销员都是属于这种“淡泊物欲”的人。这些人在市场繁荣期发家致富，他们指望散户能早早重返市场。因为，如果散户不回归的话，行业的前景是可怕的。现在，散户以投资共同基金的方式所拥有的股票和债券比过去任何时候都要多得多。百能投资公司(Putnam Investments)首席执行官鲍勃•雷诺兹(Bob Reynolds)说：“投资通过401K计划（个人退休账户）进行。共同基金的数量比股票还要多。我们身处投资者社会。”
这种状况将一直那样保持下去吗？里德女士或许一直在固执己见，但并非只有她一个人对一些举世震惊的事件做出这样的反应。大量资金以史无前例的规模从专业管理机构中抽离。去年，美国人从共同基金中总共撤出了3200亿美元(合2180亿英镑，2370亿欧元)的资金。他们把这些基金套现，又在同年向货币市场基金投入了4220亿美元。银行存款净增了2120亿美元——这一数额在截至今年3月中旬的12个月时间里又进一步上升至3700亿美元。
一些散户撇开了投资顾问，自己做起了股票交易。随着他们开始试着自己管理投资，散户交易额得到了大大提升。另外一些人则静观其变，不过他们这么做的原因和里德女士的不同。听到坏消息后，他们干脆拒绝打开他们收到的财务报告。
一位在洛杉矶工作的企业主说：“去年10月份以来，我没有看过一份投资财务报告。”他还补充说，自己的股票在2007年年底共值300多万美元，但他却拒绝估算这些股票现在还值多少钱。“我知道一切都很糟糕，但我又能做些什么呢？何必搞坏自己的心情。我需要把精力放在目前顺当的生意上。我的投资或许有很多都已经蒸发了……我有很多股票——银行股票、贝尔斯登，它们都蒸发了。在邮箱里看到财务报告后，我会立马把它扔进垃圾桶里。”
摩根大通(JPMorgan Chase)旗下摩根大通基金(JPMorgan Funds)的首席执行官乔治•盖奇(George Gatch)正在努力工作，试图与这些投资者重新建立起沟通。“我们知道人们有多么害怕，我们正在努力劝服他们回来，劝服他们坐下来和他们的财务顾问好好谈谈。”他说。在摩根大通工作的5万名顾问报告说，“要想让客户考虑一下他们接下来应采取的措施，对他们的投资组合进行正式的评估，非常困难……现在有一群美国人再也不愿看他们的财务报告。”
通过共同基金和401K计划，共有9千多万美国人持有股票。但雷诺兹先生补充道：“目前，在市场有数量庞大的资金在场外观望。散户投资者在货币市场基金和银行存款中拥有近13万亿美元资金。而在一年前，这一数字为7万亿美元。有数十亿资金正在等待机会重新入市。”
换言之，散户投资者手头上能够让市场重新活跃起来的资金。问题是，他们是否会这么做。“人口分布特征和人们的目标都没有因为市场而改变。”雷诺兹说道。但是，和其他人一样，他认为，人们的投资观念将更趋保守。
在大经纪公司以外工作的独立财务顾问就显得更加悲观。
“一旦人们把钱藏在了床垫下，就要过很长时间才会再去动它们，而现在他们已经这样做了。”一个财务顾问说道。
如果个体投资者站在一边观望，那么对那些利润丰厚的理财行业及其附属服务和财务顾问所产生的后果就不容忽视。当华尔街各大银行开始重组以迎接新纪元的到来之时，理财被视为它们收入的稳定来源。
例如，花旗集团和摩根斯坦利合并了它们的理财部门，这将导致2万多经纪人与美国银行的新“闪电部落”展开竞争，“闪电部落”原来属于美林(Merrill Lynch)。
信安环球投资公司(Principal Global Investors)总裁兼资产经理吉姆•麦考汉(Jim McCaughan)表示，他并没有看到人们弃用经纪人或顾问的趋势：“恐慌导致人们想要跟他人交谈。他们会走进顾问和经纪人的办公室的：这种现象在过去的熊市中发生过。”
不过，投资者首先需要重新开始看他们的财务报告。
译者/红岭
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