The View | Bull market in equities may not peak until 2018
Charts showing the paths before and after a peak appear as a person's upper body and the key is knowing from where to jump on and jump off
Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose". This is one of my favourite investment mantras, tested over several market cycles - the more things change, the more they stay the same.
Economist John Maynard Keynes described it as "animal spirits"; the instinct that we all have for fight or flight that causes our behaviour to form patterns.
My other favourite is usually met with a smirk or a guffaw, "this time it is different". Yet sometimes the two can coexist for a long time, until the music stops.
If we look at a graph of the MSCI International World equity index over the past 20 years, the three monster bull markets of this period stand out like the Himalayas.
The first boom and bust was caused by the dotcom bubble, which peaked and then popped at an index level of 1,431. This was driven by a mad rush to grab internet real estate, spawning Amazon, Google and Yahoo - all three being founded in 1994.
The second big bubble was the low interest rate one inspired by Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan to keep economic growth high.