Why arent retail investors petrified yet?

I looked at the British Airways iii message board this evening and what I found was somewhat disconcerting. Although its only an anecdotal tell, I would feel much more comfortable about being long if there was more fear on a board like this (as I said in my techy post on the board, shown below) -

“I find the general bullishness on this board deeply worrying (as i went long at 118p in october). The consensus seems to be overly bullish and i dont want to hear things like ‘always bounces from here’, ‘will be Xp by december’ and the like. The lack of bears on this board is making me think I might have made a mistake.

With regard to the last post about what the British Airways and the ftse 100 can and cannot do, what exactly is an historic low? Surely any new low is historic..

Does anyone have any good reasons why they are bullish as opposed to the fact that ‘it cant go any lower than this’?

Is nobody worried about the fact that the automakers might not get bailed out and enter chapter 11 and take JPM and MS with them, that the commercial mortgage market is about to collapse, that the CDS market remains an accident waiting to happen, that the euro might fall apart if the spread between Italian/greek debt and german debt is anything to go by, that Europe has lent way too much money to Eastern Europe and they might default, that Spain has lent way too much to Latin America and they might default, that Credit Default Swap premiums are at an all time high, that citigroup is down 45% in 2 days?

I could go on..

and on…

but where is the fear? ”

You’d expect joe the investor to be a bit less sanguine about the current situation by now but they seem to think they’ve seen this all before and although this period we are muddling through might not be unprecedented, its certainly not business as usual.

And if one more person asks me if it’s a good time to invest in the stock market, I think I might scream. The bottom for bear markets generally happen with exhaustion and utter disinterest from the general public, not gleeful and reckless bargain hunting. The same goes for the worlds housing markets.