"Cynicism is a path to inaction. If we give in to it, we will be lulled into complacency, into the false belief that our actions do not matter and that we can only await the inevitable," says Abdulla Shahid.

A recurring theme among some market observers is how complacent equity investors are today. A statistic often used as evidence is the US S&P 500 market-implied volatility, or VIX, index. When this is low, it usually signals that investors are sanguine about the outlook for stocks. Therefore, some use the VIX index as a contrarian indicator to hedge their downside risk. Thus, when the VIX index f