The market is not that up or down for a good reason. Most of the move is not seasonal but rotation. You can see rotation towards commodity cyclicals as well as energy and away from investments that are adversely affected by inflation as well as companies with high debt loads. Interestingly growth stocks are not down and out but registered good results as well.

"The problem with dividend investing is that capital losses from bear markets will completely overwhelm whatever dividend a company pays. For example, a 4% dividend is already considered to be “very high”. The stock market can fall -50% in a bear market, which makes the 4% dividend look like chicken scratch. This means that buying and holding a dividend stock isn’t worth it during a bear market.", very true unless the dividend is sustainable and grows long term. Even then it's a stomach cruncher.

The big issue with ETFs and other high dividend investments is that most of them are not sustainable, especially when the economy drops. This holds doubly true for real estate trusts who get hit with lower income, devaluating assets, and higher debt payments as rates rise due to their poor balance sheet status and their debt tends to increase. When investing make sure the company can pay debt with free cash flow, not debt and equity offerings.

Samsung and LG phones are both good and stable. The companies are not disappearing anytime soon. That is why they have such a good market-share in China and the US.

Agreed a lot of their cloud initiative seems to be forcing people to pay them like a utility regardless of its use or necessity as a "cloud" tool.

Regardless of Mid East crisis, oil is gradually heading back up as global reserves have been tapped while global demand rises. Although one has a hard time predicting the short term oil price, the long term has been pretty clear that it is rising for quite some time.

The top performers tend to be newer companies, companies bouncing back due to bad earnings or bad revenue growth, companies that were close to bankruptcy but got new funding, companies with a new product, etc. They are usually not the best stocks to own regularly. Thus PE ratios tend to be not good to nonexistent and balance sheet metrics could look even worse. This usually means gamblers are playing these stocks more than investors.

For investable stocks PE, cash flow, revenue and earnings growth, and balance sheet metrics like debt or lack of it to equity is still very important.

Sadly for people there are not labor shortages. In the US more people are unemployed than in decades (not working for a living wage) and many are required to take part time or odd jobs. Sadly, efficiency is making a labor shortage in the develop world obsolete. As robotics come about this will become more transparent.

The issue about demand when there is decreasing working income has still not yet been resolved. Developed countries issue is on the demand side (or lack of it), not the lack of labor.

That is true, however, it will be first felt in businesses who will not be able to raise prices and their margins will drop. This is why watching earnings is a great indicator of whether or not this is happening. It is extreme when it actually acts as a break on the economy and usually takes a while for it to manifest in such a way to cause such a severe reaction.

I don't think people are opening their wallets wide at all. In fact, those new to the market are less likely to do this for years as they pay off their debt accumulated through unemployment. The increase in expenses is due to increasing prices more than anything else and perhaps some from fear of increasing prices. The real issue is if companies can't pass on the raw material cost increases, businesses will be making more money but not more profits in the future.

That is what to look out for in the next few quarters as inflation has returned.

I think this is a case of cyclical rotation more than anything else. Given we haven't had rotation for a long while those looking at some of the favored stocks will think the game is ending while those looking at the stocks being moved into will see stronger growth and the bears will see this as a questionable trend not recognizing it as a cyclical move.

One thing both seem increasingly aware of is oil is moving upwards although the bears also think that this will end. The funny thing is, a oil price rise is about as trend oriented as it was going down, meaning, that oil is likely to keep rising gradually as the trend implies rather than reversing. I don't see too many people putting off vacation because they can't afford a $1 more a gallon in gas.