So what’s next? Is this the famous (and perennial) “top of the market”? Is it time to take the money off the table and head for the hills?

Like always, there is a very good potential that the market sheds a few dozen, or a few hundred points as investors and institutions take their profits off the table. But according to TFN editors, the factors fueling this bull market remain as powerful as they have been since the beginning of the year:

As real estate speculations are being unloaded — a painfully slow and cumbersome process for those amateurs who bid up property prices at the height of the boom and are now scrambling to break even — and new money is re-routed from property and compensation back into equities, money flow is shifting back in favor of stocks.

Then there is the global comparison: In many ways, US stocks are now as undervalued as US real estate was in 2000. Stock markets all over the world — even in such pedantic, uninspiring economies with paltry growth as Germany and France — have doubled and tripled in the time it took the Dow Jones to recover from its fall from grace in 2001.

Add solid corporate profits (even for that proverbial “River of No Returns”, Amazon), Merger Mania, stock buybacks (reducing supply), and an unprecedented level of US and global prosperity, and the argument of a Dow 15,000 – even 16,000 within the next 12 months — appears reasonable. At current exchange rates, dollar-denominated assets are dirt cheap from the perspective of global capital.

TFN remains overall bullish on US stocks — with potential for temporary pullbacks back to 11,500.

TaipanFinancialNews (TFN) is an independent publisher of practical and actionable financial information geared to the needs of individual investors. Check out their daily articles and interviews at http://www.taipanfinancialnews.com