Seemingly Inconsistent

At the beginning of the year I was in a small minority that was looking for a double dip and am still in that camp although it has grown. Yet, here we are and I am constructive on the stock market in the short term. I know that many readers must find this seeming inconsistency hard to understand. Hopefully the following two points will help explain:

• What everybody knows is not worth knowing. Everybody is in agreement that the economy is slowing so what is the edge of making negative bets based on that fact?
• The stock market is not the economy. Yes the stock market correlates to the economy most of the time. But sometimes it leads, sometimes it lags and sometimes it does neither. 

Believe it or not when I started investing I mostly traded  based on my long term thesis. It took me nearly a decade of constantly giving back gains because of short term fluctuations before I stopped being stubborn.

I started by taking off my long term trades when the markets reached extremes. Once I realized I  was pretty good at picking out the extremes, I started placing short term trades that went against my longer term beliefs. That was my breakthrough and my profitability shot through the roof to the point that I eventually built up enough money to trade and invest full time.