Quality stocks offset doom and gloom

Article Excerpt

As an investor, you will always find someone forecasting widespread financial calamity. Recessions come and go and the market rises and falls (but mostly rises, at least over long periods). But the dreaded financial calamities always seem to fizzle, like the Y2K computer scare of the late 1990s (or the great California earthquake, or the Swine Flu pandemic, and so on). In short, that means nothing much comes of them. The arguments of those predicting impending financial doom always seem compelling. But applying logic to a slanted or incomplete set of facts leads to errors. When the black plague hit Europe, some villagers felt it was obvious that somebody had poisoned their well. What else could be causing it? For that matter, if you look out the window, it looks like the earth is flat. Predictions of financial doom always depend on assumptions and extrapolation that are not likely to happen in real life. Certainly, we will continue to have market setbacks…