Bear blog deterioration

This weekend a popular bear blog I track has called it quits. I'm not going to mention it for the sake of not starting some pissing match. The author of the blog said he's no longer going to do his daily rants anymore. Instead he's simply going to focus on managing his "subscriber services" (God help them). His reason for quitting the blog is that nobody listens to him anymore and nobody is supporting the blog by subscribing to his services so he feels he is wasting his time. Well, when your readership is on the wrong end of a 1 year 75% rally they probably don't have the confidence nor the cash to subscribe.

Let me tell you something about subscriber services that give you buy and sell signals. Fuck them. Wanna know who George Soros and Warren Buffet subscribe to?....George Soros and Warren Buffet that's who. You can and should learn from others who have been successful and it's perfectly fine to read about the opinions of others (in fact you should be willing to read what both bulls and bears have to say to get a balanced perspective) but in the end you have to be your own guru. Those who are really successful in the market making bundles of money don't concern themselves with the hassles of rinky dink subscriptions...they are too busy making money. The only subscriptions worth signing up to are market data and charts. The only one I currently use is decisionpoint.com. It's well worth the money.

As Ivan Draggo said "I fight for me!" I write this blog for cathartic purposes. It's also a good way for me to look back whenever I feel a particular way about the market as I did in the past and then see how things turned out. Also, getting feedback and other perspectives is beneficial but not critical. If nobody showed up here I wouldn't give a rat's ass. It's been about 11 months now and I probably have less than 10 regular readers and it doesn't bother me one bit unlike like that crybaby who's shutting down his blog.

I've also noticed deterioration in other bearish blogs. They aren't making as many posts as they used to. The author of one of them has allowed for other people to make posts which means he's too dejected to chime in all the time. Is this a contrarian sign that another bear market is around the corner? I don't think so but it may very well signal a correction in the near future.

First of all, these bears are capitulating begrudgingly. They haven't converted to bulls nor have given up completely. Some have given up by force (i.e. by getting crippled or wiped out) while others have tried to become more "flexible" by attempting to play both sides while others are still outright permabearing. None of these clowns have actually converted to the bull side outright and are still bears deep down. Bull markets don't end with bears simply capitulating begrudgingly like this. They end when most people have embraced the bull market i.e. when most people are believers of the bull market. The destruction of so many bears like we are seeing right now means we are probably near the tail end of the first phase of the bull market. The situation right now reminds me very much of the destruction of tech/internet retail bulls occurred in 2001. Their despair didn't signal the end of the bear market but simply led to the recognition phase of it. Then the last of the holdouts got wiped out in 2002. Bull markets take more time for people to be converted from bears to bulls because fear is at least twice as strong as greed and bull markets move a lot slower than bear markets (aside from the initial 10-12 month rally that typically occurs off the bear market bottom). Since we've just been through 2 devastating bear markets in a span of 10 years bearishness seems to be deeply ingrained almost permanently so.