In today’s post (the last in this series, for the moment), we’ll look at the U.S. stock market.

We are in the middle of a very significant bull market—up almost 150 percent since the bottom in 2009—and the question right now is whether the run can continue. I was on a CIO panel at Financial Advisor magazine’s alternative investments conference yesterday, and the views of my fellow panelists—a really impressive group, in which I was flattered to be included—ranged from major declines to consistent, multiyear advances. Even the pros disagree. My own views, as you know, are cautious. Why that is will become clear.

As regular readers know, I’ve been a long-term China bear. This attitude has become mainstream recently, but I still believe there’s value in thinking about China. First of all, I could still be wrong, and second, looking at China as an investment gives us another chance to ask some of the questions I posed the other day.

First, of course, is do we understand what’s going on? Earlier in the Chinese story, the answer was yes. China was using very low wage rates to attract manufacturing, the products of which were then sold to Western markets—a simple, well-proven business model. Recently, though, that model has developed cracks. Chinese wage rates are no longer as attractive, while demand from the West has dropped off.

I was going to touch on China and the U.S. markets today, but something happened over the weekend that’s such a good illustration of the points I made on Friday that I have to talk about it first.

Saturday afternoon, my dad forwarded me an investment offer he had received from an oil and gas sponsor in Kentucky. They wanted to sell him a 1/64-of-1-percent interest in oil and gas wells there for $2,500, for which they believed he could receive a payout of about 90 percent of his initial investment in year one.

Per yesterday’s post, I want to start off by defining my terms. “Hedge fund,” for purposes of this discussion, means “currently fashionable investment that everyone wants because they think they will make a lot of money.” In this sense, “hedge fund” could mean housing in the mid-2000s, tech stocks in the late 1990s, commodities or the Nifty Fifty stocks in the 1970s, or—well, you get the idea.

At any given time, there will be a hot investment idea that is valid. (That’s probably how it got hot in the first place.) There will be well-established managers executing successfully in that space. They will understand the market, know what they’re doing and why, and will be very unhappy to see the rest of the world showing up in their niche.

One of the more, shall we say, interesting magazine covers showed up on my desk yesterday. Not, as you might expect, the Rolling Stone cover, which is simply a contemptible bid for publicity. No, I’m referring to the Bloomberg BusinessWeek cover, which displayed a somewhat graphic, at least on an implied basis, picture and graph.

The headline on the cover is “The Hedge Fund Myth,” and the cover story spends quite a bit of time excoriating hedge fund managers for making lots of money and not deserving it.

So my wife, who is the more organized thinker of the two of us, wanted to continue last summer’s research project in a more structured way. Rather than just randomly looking for lobster rolls to try, she researched which local restaurants had received accolades for them, with the idea that we’d work our way through the award winners.

As I have learned to do over the years, I bowed to her superior wisdom, with the result that we tried the lobster rolls at the Clam Shack, a small place right by the bridge in the center of Kennebunkport, Maine.

Many of the economic stats coming out now are pretty weak. Over the past couple of days, headlines announced that economic growth had fallen short of expectations, with growth for the second quarter quite possibly below 1 percent.

I woke up in Maine this morning with the sun shining and Jackson running into my room as I read the papers. We spent yesterday at the beach, with quite a bit of the time devoted to searching around a large tide pool. We found lots of crabs, small lobsters, starfish, eels, hermit crabs, and, of course, tons of snails, all hiding in and around rocks and seaweed.

For those of you who don’t know, Glass-Steagall was the law that, to put it at its simplest, separated deposit-taking banks from the investment banks. It was passed during the Great Depression to prevent Wall Street risks from affecting the normal day-to-day business of Main Street, which had happened prior to the Depression. It did this by prohibiting banks that offered deposit insurance from engaging in Wall Street activities like trading. The big thing is, it worked. There were no systemic banking crises like that of 2008 while the law was in force, from 1933 to 1999.

A modernized version was just introduced in Congress by Elizabeth Warren and John McCain, an interesting pair. Warren is the Massachusetts senator who made her name trying to regulate the financial industry, while McCain is a former Republican presidential nominee. They propose a very similar set of restrictions, with the express purpose of taking the financial industry back to 1998, before Glass-Steagall was repealed.

I had a chance to speak on Bloomberg Radio last night about the release of the Fed minutes from the June meeting. After spending some time going through them, looking at the exact wording and thinking about what was likely to happen over the next couple of months, I came to a conclusion: there really wasn’t all that much there.

Let’s recap. First, the markets reacted strongly to Ben Bernanke’s post-June-meeting press conference, where he said that the Fed would start to reduce stimulus at some point, not soon, if the economy’s performance warranted it. The market apparently interpreted this to mean the Fed would be exiting the stimulus immediately and raising interest rates shortly thereafter, resulting in a rise in rates and a hit to the stock market.