Not to keep beating a dead horse, but here's a quote from a Hussman article from October 2017:
"Based on the consensus of the most historically-reliable market valuation measures we identify, the U.S. equity market is now at the most offensive level of overvaluation in history, exceeding even the levels observed in 1929 and 2000".
On October 1st, 2017, the S&P closed at 2,529. It's most recent close was 4,327. That's a gain of 71% in 3 years, 9 months. Annualized, that's about 15.4%. (I wanted to quote his older articles, where he made similar claims, but they seem to have been removed from his site - perhaps because they were so spectacularly wrong).
"With the S&P 500 likely to lose more than -60% by the completion of the current market cycle, it will be fine if the initial few percent lower do nothing for us."
He doesn't define what exactly he means by "completion of the current market cycle". But the S&P's lowest close in March 2020 (during the peak uncertainty as the pandemic escalated rapidly) was 2,237. Hussman called for a drop of more than 60%. Even with a once-per-century pandemic, that Hussman couldn't have foreseen, which directly caused the market to crash, the S&P was only down about 11% from when he published that article. Obviously it's not good to lose 11% over 2.5 years, but that's a far cry from the 60% he was calling for.
How did Hussman's Strategic Growth Fund do? It was at $6.41 on October 1st, 2017. It dropped as low as $5.20 during Q1 2020. It's since rebounded to $6.60. So his fund dropped 19% during the initial pandemic scare (more than the market as a whole - a shockingly bad result since the fund, in his words, has "emphasis on the protection of capital during unfavorable market conditions").
If you bought his fund in October 2017, you'd be up 3% since he published his doomsday article. That's not 3% per year - 3% in total over 3 years, 9 months. You'd have made more money with a GIC - and have stomached far less volatility.
Hussman's articles are interesting, I'll grant that, but he's been spectacularly wrong. To quote myself - the problem with a perma-bear is, even though they'll sometimes be right, you'll miss out on so much growth in the years they're wrong, that you end up way behind as a result. Hopefully nobody here took his advice when his articles were mentioned 15 months ago.
