Baloney...the stock market is just sitting there and while real estate seems high in some places, it is just creeping up in most burbs and rural areas. If gas prices continue to shoot up, and presuming there is a strong growth in telecommuting, watch for shifting sands (but not collapse) in the RE market.
"In a new study, people were asked to buy and sell virtual stocks that had long histories of either increasing or decreasing earnings. For the most part, folks bought winners and sold losers."
That's perfectly rational behavior; it would be irrational to invest in enterprises with decreasing or no earnings. Furthermore, that does not contradict the advice to "Buy low," and "Sell high." However, only in retrospect does one know whether he bought low or high. He cannot make that determination beforehand because only if the stock goes up was it low and if it goes down, it was high. That is indicative of only a theoretical understanding of motion (momentum) and not the actual experience of it.
All price movements are rational in the sense that they are real, or actual. Speculations, as the author is doing, is irrational because there is no basis in fact -- but exists only in his mind -- as to what "should be" happening, as though he alone were the arbiter of these things. That's what the market is and does -- despite one's individual value judgments (and one certainly is entitled to his opinion not to make money in this way).
In order to be successful with an investment, the market value has to go up -- in actuality, and not just theoretically in spite of its market price. Every actual investor/business owner knows this to be true. Only academics, who never actually invest but create all kinds of theoretical models and are therefore "objective," have never made any money doing so and think money can never be made that way because it is all a random, zero-sum game.
it would be hard to agree that the stock market has "momentum." "Inertia," or perhaps "potenial energy" is more like it. junk-science alert.