The market and nature of investors is so different today, I have to wonder if we can really expect to see the same cycles and trends.
20 years ago and before the market was made up mostly of bigtime investors with large holdings and mostly professionally managed money. It's a different ballgame now thanks to the net and discount brokerages.
There's a lot of money out there controlled by individuals who know little about finance and basically treat the market like a very high stake trip to the track. Technology now makes it easy to move money fast. So even the managed money moves more often than it used to.
We have thousands of mutual funds out there. And even those aren't stable. In the past funds pretty much just watched the money come in from various payroll contribution plans and such. Distributions were not common. Now you have people who chase the hot funds and move money in and out of those almost like it was a stock. Most 401K plans even let you move money between funds at will via the web.
I think this makes the market perhaps a lot more reactionary than it has been historically. People chase hot trends and if anything bad happens they panic and try to either lock in profits or stop their losses.
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