Post Boomerang Stock Market Performance

This tweet by Jesse Livermore got me thinking:

It got me thinking about Michael Lewis' last book Boomerang, which as ever was very well written. It has some pretty scary stories with Greece and Ireland as two of the worst case studies. The book calls them the new third world, effectively layering gloom on top of boom about state of the markets. I ran a quick chart on YCharts from the publication date of Boomerang (Oct 3, 2011) til now. The markets that rightly calls disastrous economic situations in the book have shown a fair amount of resiliency since Boomerang came out

Since Boomerang came out in October 2011, Ireland (EIRL) +107%, Greece (GREK) + 64%, Germany (EWG) +54%, and  S&P +48%. Not bad.

I enjoyed Boomerang, and I am not saying that its a contrary indicator, you would have required a very high risk tolerance to buy things in those markets. Still any book and one by a skilled storyteller especially should be taken with heaping buckets of salt. Jim Collins' Good to Great is another example. Companies that were studied as almost evergreen in the book later turned out to be in need of bail outs Fannie Mae and bankrupt (Circuit City).

Obviously there was real risk to what Lewis captured, but at the same time publication could also be viewed as a sign of John Templeton's maximum pessimism.