I was surfing radio channels this morning when I overheard this quote from a market commentator: "...thank god for the resource boom - its masking our incompetence." As our markets are in uncertain times - Having the recent market crashes and the possibility of a recession in the United States. (I haven't been following the figures - but when are they going to call it?) [Aside: In macroeconomics, a recession is a decline in a country's gross domestic product (GDP), or negative real economic growth, for two or more successive quarters of a year.] Where are we headed?

I don't know where we're headed. I was watching Lateline business on ABC last night and the host, Ali Moore, asked her two guests Dirk Morris from BT Investment Management and Gerard Minack from Morgan Stanley about the direction of the Australian markets the coming year. She stated that the All Ordinaries (the Australian Stock Exchange index) was at 5921 and asked where they predict the market index will be at the end of the year. One said around the 5000's mark and the other said high 6000's mark. One very bearish - and one very bullish. But I want to talk about trading incompetence.

So has the market commentator got it right? The thought was in the back of mind all along. Over the past decade, trading has been booming. Together with the boom of the internet - the internet had opened doors to numerous amounts of retail traders. But over that decade we also had the best times on the markets - continuous growth for a very long time. Any old fool could have gone long and gained a profit from the ever-rising markets over recent years. Have we been incompetent at trading all along? Have we been fluking our trading returns all this time?