If I were only that smart!

I was looking forward to the post I made in June last year about selling stocks to pay my mortgage faster and figured I looked pretty wise when I said:

"and also being concerned about the current heights of the stock market, I decided to act"

I wish I could say for sure that I had seen the current downturn coming, but I obviously had no idea. I didn't know when it would be and how bad it would be. That said, there was a feeling of over-excitement in the market and the investor sentiment was at a very high as well. The problem is that I'm not sure what conclusion to draw other than the usual contrarian one : sell when people are buying and buy when people are selling!

Note that it's also easy to predict problems too long in advance like I reported on investor sentiment in December 2006 .