When the market price of shares falls, you will only be happy if you are short, right?

Or at least sitting out of the market in cash?

Well perhaps, but it does depend somewhat on why you participate in the market at all. Maybe you are a long term investor, and maybe you regard price falls as manna from heaven. If you buy some shares every week, would you prefer if the price rises (get a false sense of euphoria from a paper profit) or if the price falls (get a larger number of added shares for the same weekly cash outflow)?

A sage author has opined that "in the long term, its only earnings" (see link Busetti - Great Investment Picture ) so I thought it may be helpful to glance ta the current shareprice falls in context of the underlying earnings trajectories:-

Here is the picture, for Large Caps (Top40) - note the index is plotted in blue, and index' earnings (timesed by a constant multiple for scaling) plotted in red

And in case you think its just the big firms who dominate the JSE by their pure scale and have unfair access to profits in the real economy, here is the same data for midcaps ...

and small caps...

Food for thought!

Cheers

Stuart