Howard Marks makes a point in his book, Mastering the Market Cycle, that cycles are messy. The repetition of cycles is not like a metronome — up and down, up and down — sounding off regular intervals. The repetition is only in a very general sense.
It’s not that B follows A and C follows B, but A leads to B because a multitude of factors influenced the how, why, when, and where of the next leg of the sequence causing B to happen. Then a multitude of factors causes C, and so on.
The point Marks is making is that cycles aren’t clean and uniform in the real world, but more of a jumbled messy interaction between human behavior, markets, businesses, economies…and so forth: Continue Reading…