Jack Bogle, the father of index funds, isn't very impressed by the fact that he called the market's bottom in March 2009.
When asked by MarketBeat, he was dismissive about it. "I'd have to look at what I said," the founder of Vanguard Funds offered up. "I almost never talk about tops and bottoms. I have to be very humble about that."
Bogle is one of the small contingent of market insiders who, back in March 2009 when the equities market was coming to the end of a historic plunge, realized the market was hitting bottom, and said so. It wasn't an easy time to do so. Fear was rampant. Hundreds of thousands of people were losing their jobs monthly as companies cut deep. The market was terrified of the new administration, and the new Treasury Secretary in particular. Few saw through the haze.
The few who did see through that haze, like Bogle and Jeff Saut and Doug Kass, were the early adopters of a bull run that now, nearly four years to the day from that low, has returned the Dow Jones Industrial Average back to it 2007 high.
The guys who called it saw it coming. In a Feb. 24, 2009, interview on Bloomberg, Bogle said "We've got to be getting close to the lows in the stock market finally." BusinessWeek's Roben Farzad maintains that Bogle called the bottom while on an Acela train ride, on March 9, the day the S&P 500 made its post-crash closing low of 676.
"I was pretty sure of that call," said Jeff Saut, chief investment strategist at Raymond James, another person who made the call. He actually thought the market had started bottoming in October of 2008. "The market was totally washed out, all the bad news was on the table, stocks were oversold."
Saut made his prediction in a March 2 interview on Bloomberg, when he said the lows had been hit and he was going "all in." It was not a popular opinion among his firm's clients, he said. At the time, after six months of the worst selling anybody had seen in their lives, few people were willing to accept that the worst was over. The prevailing sentiment was utter gloom.
rest http://blogs.wsj.com/marketbeat/2013/03/06/the-pros-who-called-the-bottom/
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