First off, apologies for the smug "I told you so" tone of this post. But I think I'm entitled to a little bit of smugness, especially after I nailed the mood music in my call to go heavily long in mid-July. Anyone taking up my view ought to be sitting with a big grin on their face by now.

The main point I want to make in this blog is to show how it pays to hold and run those winning trades. As I always say, I trade with small stakes but aim to run those positions over long timeframes, adding to winning positions. And that's worked. There's still cash on the sidelines, prices have been showing momentum, and so far, none of the selloffs have yet really got any sustained momentum behind them – rather they've been treated as buying opportunities. So I'm staying 'long and strong'…

The bears will argue, as they have been since March, that it's a summer bear rally (trading volumes are thin and tailing away) but I think there's something more fundamentally interesting happening here. And as one of my favourite hedgies Paul Tudor Jones says, if the market moves up by 45% and you catch the move, does it really matter whether we call it a bull market or a bear market rally? He thinks it's a bear market rally. It might well be. Next year's equity market might not be a pretty picture at all, as the drag of massive unemployment combined with consumer caution and higher resources costs sinks in. But if, before then, we're going to 10,000 on the Dow, 5,000 on FTSE and 1,100 on the S&P, does it matter? Well, yes, if you're risking buying in at this relatively late stage. But if, like me, you're sitting on a long FTSE position from 4,130 and a pile of equity longs, every single one of which is well up from where you bought, you can afford to be a bit more relaxed. And that's why there's still upward momentum.

So Why Am I So Bullish?