As expected, but disappointingly, US Federal Reserve did not raise interest rates on Wed. The reasons for my pessimism for the current economic conditions are explained in What Have We Got After 8 Years of Easy Money? Unless we see evidence of coordinated fiscal stimulus from governments around the world to increase aggregate demand, more liquidity via easy monetary conditions will only lead to more value destruction as we have seen so far. Given the precarious investing environment, I have been gradually taking money off the table and building up my defences, before everyone else starts to rush for the exit. Based on the experience of the last 12 months, I believe the exit might be narrower than most people expect.

12 months is not a long time. However, over the same period, we have had at least 3 market declines, namely:

In all these 3 episodes, the declines were fast and furious. See the figures below for the extent and duration of the decline. Note that the no. of days in the figures refers to the no. of trading days.

In fact, these 3 episodes are not the only times the stock market has declined so rapidly. As far back as Jun 2013, when then Fed chairman raised the possibility of slowing down and scaling back its bond purchases under the Quantitative Easing programme, the markets had also gone into a tailspin, triggering the famous Taper Tantrum. However, neither the extent or the speed of decline matched those that we observed in the last 12 months.

Fig. 4: STI Decline in Jun 2013

A summary of the declines is shown in the table below.

See related blog posts:

• What Have We Got After 8 Years of Easy Money?
• Sneak Attack on My Cash Reservoirs 
• Knowing When Others Are Fearful