Stock Markets : There is weakness beneath the surface of the indices

Mike Gleason: Well, I want to start out by asking you about the current state of the financial world here in the early part of 2016. We’ve got the global equities markets continuing to roll over. Meanwhile, the metals are doing quite well and acting as a bit of a safe haven. What do you make of the market action here, so far this year?

Marc Faber: Well, basically, the financial markets have been sick for quite some time. Emerging markets either never made a new high above the 2006, 2007 highs, or they peaked out in 2011, or some even later in 2014. Basically after about February/March 2015, they started to drift. And in the U.S., the indices were strong, but the average stock was down substantially in 2015. This is called weakness beneath the surface of the indices because an index, theoretically, could have 500 stocks and 499 decline, but one stock goes up a lot and drives up the index. So this happened last year, to some extent, in the U.S… you have the strong stocks, Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, Google, and maybe another 20 stocks that were going up. And at the same time, you have thousands of stocks that were acting badly and going down, which accounts for actually a horrible performance for most investors. Now in January, reality set in with the strong stocks, they’re all down 20, 30, and sometimes even more percentages.

@ http://www.valuewalk.com/2016/02/marc-faber-on-cashless-society-gold

Marc Faber is an international investor known for his uncanny predictions of the stock market and futures markets around the world.Dr. Doom also trades currencies and commodity futures like Gold and Oil.