Amazingly enough, after the concern about another Black Monday, the 1987 drop's anniversary today hasn’t generated much media attention. It’s almost like it never happened.

After I posted my piece on diversification last week, my colleagues Peter Essele and Anu Gaggar reminded me that they had done a study of some of the trends behind that post. Their analysis highlights a couple detailed examples of what I was talking about. This may be a more technical read, but the conclusions are compelling. Great job, guys! Over to Peter and Anu.

In the past couple of days, three different people have forwarded me an opinion piece that attempts to draw some parallels between the way the market acted in October 1987—before the infamous Black Monday—and the way it’s acting now. Some analysts are actually issuing alerts that we might get a significant pullback.

Yesterday, I laid out some of the big-picture constraints I see impacting the economy and the markets over the next year or two. Today, let’s take a look at what we can reasonably expect over the next month and for the rest of the year.

Writing my fourth-quarter preview of the economy and markets, which I plan to share with you tomorrow, I started thinking about several big ideas that are in play right now. Though these themes aren’t particularly actionable, they will frame our discussion of the near- to medium-term future.

With market turbulence continuing today and questions pouring in, I am struck once again by the core issue we’re wrestling with here: the time horizon problem. Although we get meaningful results in the long term, we often feel compelled to react in the short term. 

I’ve been traveling this week, spending a day in Washington talking with the press and then speaking this morning at the Financial Planning Association conference. These trips are always useful in that I get a chance to bounce ideas off a lot of people in the real world. They can also be surprising. Not so much in the questions I’m asked—people are worried about the economy, worried about the markets, wondering what’s next—but in what comes out of my mouth when I answer them.

Back in the office after my vacation, the news is generally good. Economic stats continue to surprise to the upside, markets are close to all-time highs, and the Labor Day weekend is coming. So, of course, as Eeyore, my thoughts are turning to things to worry about.

I’m not the only one either. A reader recently wrote in asking, “What about the national debt?”

I dropped my phone the other day, severely cracking its face. It still worked, but I felt like I was getting slivers of glass in my finger every time I used it, so I took it in for repair. The fix worked fine in the short term, but last night, the phone just died. Nothing.

It’s been almost a year since I last wrote about investment bubbles. Although there have been ample grounds for discussing the topic, I suspect that other events have seemed more pressing.