AN attack by a Great White shark has been used to sound a warning about United States bond and stock markets' performance this year.
Ray DeVoe, of US brokerage Legg Mason Wood Walker, says in his DeVoe Report: 'When things look too good to be true, they probably are.' To highlight the feeling of quiet dread Mr DeVoe has about the apparently benign conditions in the US - chiefly low inflation and low bond yields coupled with strong gains on Wall Street - he has included a gripping passage from the book Blue Meridian - The Search for the Great White Shark by Peter Mathiessen.
The scene: a spear fishing contest at Aldinga in South Australia, where champion skin diver Rodney Fox, in the lead, heads for the weigh-in after spearing the last of his catch.
'On his last trip to the beach with a load of fish, he had noticed two large dusky morwongs (a perch-like fish) near a triangular coral head about three quarters of a mile offshore. One of the big morwongs was out in the open in a patch of brown algae, and Fox was gliding in on it, intent, spear-gun extended like an antenna, when he felt himself overtaken by a strange stillness in the water, a suspension of sound and motion, as if all the creatures of the reef had paused to watch him.
' 'It was just a gut feeling,' he says, 'I didn't tense up or anything - I didn't have time to.' For at that moment he was struck so hard on his left side that his face mask was knocked off and his spear-gun sent spinning from his hand, and he found himself swirled swiftly through the water by something that enclosed him from the left shoulder to the waist. A great pressure made his insides feel as if they had been forced to his right side - he seemed to be choking, and he could not move. Upside-down and in the creature's mouth, he was being rushed through the water and only now did he make out the stroke of a great shark's powerful tail. He was groping wildly, trying to gouge its eyes, when inexplicably, of its own accord, the shark let go.' Some 462 stitches later, Mr Fox survived to recount the story.
Mr DeVoe believes there are lessons in this story for investors in US markets.
