Markets tend to behave like a swinging pendulum....
   Shareholder: [In the 1970s], a stampede of people came after real estate and drove the prices and the cost of building materials and labor up. Now you're seeing some people leaving real estate.
   Ten or fifteen years from now, might not people decide that they don't want to be stockholders -- the way they did with high-tech stocks?

   Cundill: You're talking not about demographics, but rather what I would call crowd behavior -- because in the real estate boom everybody just piled in almost without thinking about it. At various times -- in the late 1960s, for example -- the same thing's happened in common stocks.
   Graham talked about that. He observed that markets were almost always overpessimistic or overoptimistic -- that they usually didn't stay at fair value; that they were very infrequently at what you might call equilibrium value. Almost always, they go from a point of undervaluation to over and back -- almost like the swing of a pendulum.

We have a good chance of a correction, but not a crash.
   Cundill: [A flight from stocks] is always possible, but I don't think it's terribly dangerous today -- because even though you have overvaluations, they're not as extreme as I've seen at other times. But that doesn't mean we won't have it in the future.
   You might have one of those periods -- and you could go back to the period that we had when we started in 1975 until almost a decade later in 1985 -- where there was just a myriad of bargains to be bought. And people who'd been beaten up so badly -- having had such a bad experience -- simply didn't have the courage to come back in.
   But do I think we have a good shot at that today? No, I don't. Individual markets and individual components like the Netscapes and so forth may go down. And I suspect we have a good chance of a correction in the U.S. -- although not so much in Canada. But I don't foresee a big crash.

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