It Is Almost Always Darkest at Dawn

While fully recognizing that all is not well with the (economic/financial) world and that numerous challenges still exist, I remain more upbeat than most regarding our investment future: I view the recent market weakness as an opportunity to be embraced rather than something to be feared, as, arguably, much of the headwinds have been discounted in market prices.

Over the past few weeks, the business media has been dominated by talking heads who are now expressing a Cassandra-like vision of the future for our capital markets and world economies. CNBC, Bloomberg and Fox Business Network have paraded an endless procession of pontificators, who almost universally highlight the downside to the world's stock markets -- few discuss the opportunities or the upside. And, unfortunately, many who are paraded use past prices as their investment template and/or are not particularly rigorous in their fundamental analysis.

But reactionary (not anticipatory and contrarian) investment commentary is not exclusive to CNBC, Bloomberg and Fox Business Network. Of the 45 total posts aggregated on RealClearMarkets yesterday, 30 were downbeat -- and I would characterize most of those 30 columns as very downbeat: