Good God in heaven above, this market was boring today. Today? What am I talking about? It’s boring in general! Do you need proof? Just look at what the VIX has been doing for weeks now:
Slope of Hope Blog Posts
Slope initially began as a blog, so this is where most of the website’s content resides. Here we have tens of thousands of posts dating back over a decade. These are listed in reverse chronological order. Click on any category icon below to see posts tagged with that particular subject, or click on a word in the category cloud on the right side of the screen for more specific choices.
Preserving My Sanity
If I was completely dependent on the market for my mental health, I would have made myself into a six foot tall Christmas ornament hanging from a coniferous tree long, long ago. To be sure, the market influences my disposition: I’m about fifty times happier than normal (a very tiny starting figure, certainly) when the market is getting killed. Over the past seven years, this has happened approximately never. Indeed, even the most recent history of the market looks like the chart below: it is either (a) going up quickly, or (b) it’s going up slowly. This is what markets look like when the VIX is approaching single digits, people.
Robbins’ Egg
About a week ago, I mentioned in the comments section that a new documentary appeared on Netflix called I Am Not Your Guru, which is about Tony Robbins. Now, I’m familiar with who Tony Robbins is, because it’s pretty hard not to be if you live in the U.S. At first, I thought it would be some kind of tell-all take-down of the man, but it turns out it’s pretty much a two hour commercial for the guy (he did, after all, have total approval over its content).
I found it terribly interesting to watch, however. I tend to view the whole New Age-y, Self-Help-y, Personal Empowerment industry to be pretty vile. It strikes me as shallow, shamelessly opportunistic, and it tries to cloth itself in some kind of spirituality when, in fact, it’s 99% about making a buck. This clown on YouTube captures it nicely (and this isn’t a parody; he’s for real):
Kobayashi Maru
On a day like this, when bulls the world over are give each other circle jerks and slaps on the back (hopefully not in that order, since hygiene is paramount), you would expect Tim Knight, the Sangre de Cristo of bears, to be weeping from the cross. Well, things have sucked out loud since that ridiculous Brexit fiasco (e.g. 1 1/4 days of selling, only to be aborted by the CBs worldwide). Indeed, I feel like the bears (correction, bear………that would be me, now castigated even by his own readers) is in a Kobayashi Maru market:
!!!
Subtitle: Brexit!!! Silver!!! Bonds!!! Deflation!!!
It’s a funny title for a segment, but it is appropriate. I don’t want to be too flippant with dismissals of inflammatory market events like ‘Brexit’ as simply hype. There is very real macro fundamental shifting going on behind the hype. But in market management, macro fundamentals play out over long stretches of time and nobody knows exactly how all the moving parts are going to affect the subject of the hype (in this case Britain and the EU), let alone the asset markets we are tasked to invest in, trade or avoid.
This is where market psychology comes into play, hence the ‘!!!’ title. As already noted, I get the feeling that the Brexit drama was an exclamation point on the global deflationary phase that has been in play since 2011, when the acute phase of the ‘Euro Crisis’ first erupted (sending gold to 1900+ an ounce). You may recall that silver and commodities had already blown off and blown out but gold pulled in the risk ‘off’ bid amid a developing deflationary force. It then blew out and global deflation ensued.
