来自CNBC的这篇文章再次给人们看到巴菲特尽管无法预测短期股票市场走向，但是却擅长看大势的智慧。

还是他去年那时说的那句话“如果你等待知更鸟，那么春天可能过去了”。在一年前巴菲特号召大家去买美股的时候，从下图看到并非股票市场的最低点，但是从那之后，S&P500指数上涨了14.9%。

 

客观来说，巴菲特还是太早发出买入的信号，因为如果从今年3月9日的最低点进入，S&P500从那时到现在涨了60%。

 

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One year ago, even though the financial world was "a mess" and would probably get messier, Warren Buffett wrote in the New York Times that he was buying U.S. stocks to lock in a "slice of America's future at a marked-down price."

 

He cited his "simple" rule: "Be fearful when others are greedy, and be greedy when others are fearful."

One year later, the benchmark S&P 500 is 14.9 percent higher than it was the night before Buffett's "Buy American" op-ed (read the complete article) was published on Friday, October 17, 2008.

But that's beside the point.

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In his op-ed, Buffett makes clear he wasn't trying to "time" the market.  He wrote he didn't have the "faintest idea" whether stocks would be higher or lower one month, or one year later.  Both qualify as short-term for Buffett.  He was looking five, ten, or twenty years into the future.

And it's a good thing Buffett wasn't trying to pick a short-term bottom, because his timing was awful.  The S&P continued to drop that fall and winter, closing at its bear-market low of 676.53 on March 9.

If you had been smart or lucky enough to go all-in on the S&P on that day, you'd be up 60 percent now.

But Buffett's key point is that very few of us are going to be that smart or that lucky.  Those waiting for the perfect moment run a big risk of coming in too late, especially if they're looking for hints that things are getting better.

The Oracle of Omaha won't make predictions about specific stock market moves, but he does have one strongly-held prophecy about the future: "The market will move higher, perhaps substantially so, well before either sentiment or the economy turns up.  So if you wait for the robins, spring will be over."