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Jesus Tap-Dancing Christ, I am about to fall asleep with this market. Eight solid weeks of the world’s most boring Othello game. Black. White. Black. White. On and on and on. I have nothing more to say. I’m just griping to no one in particular. Just Tim bitching.
Ya know, it sure would be nice to have some kind of trend, if the market wouldn’t mind too much. I mean, just look at the past couple of months. This is nothing short of ridiculous. For all the ups and downs, we’re at exactly the same price we were on November 19th. Six months of meandering with no destination.
Human nature – – particularly collective human nature – – fascinates me. I was thinking this morning about the completely unprecedented event of getting three hate mails in a very tight cluster last month (whereas normally I might get one, if that, in an entire year), and I was wondering about when that happened; well, it was no big surprise:
It’s extraordinary to me that three men – – and, of course, they just had to be men – – would, without conferring with one another, all decide to take the trouble and time out of their oh-so-busy lives to write me something hateful. (After all, since they’ve given me $0.00 in my life, it’s perfectly fair of them to expect me to perform services for them of the highest caliber).
Suffice it to say I hope they all got very long based on their venom, and that they remain so. God knows that I deserve kindness, and nothing like this, although their unwitting “Short” signal was, in retrospect, mildly interesting.
As a courtesy, which none of them deserve, I’ve blotted out the surnames, not that anyone has ever heard of any of these people. I will not debase myself to the behavior of others.
At the start of this week, on my Tastytrade show, I said that it felt like something had “snapped” in the market. There was a confluence of little events that took place that convinced me that the few remaining bears had either lost their minds or thrown in the towel. The “Disappointment After Doha” – – that is, the inexplicable rise in the market after the complete collapse of talks in Qatar last Sunday – – – was the straw that broke the camel’s back for many people.
Now, in my line of work, you’d expect me to be the recipient of a regular amount of hate mail. For one thing, my view is an unpopular one. The vast majority of people actually want assets to inflate in perpetuity. A permanent bull market would be just dandy for 99.9% of the public, and not only do I tout exactly the opposite, but I’m rather bombastic about it.
It has been ten weeks since the market bottomed on February 11th. To me, it feels like ten years. It’s been a grueling, awful grind, but it didn’t get really beyond-belief miserable until March 17th, when Yellen went uber-dovish and patterns and trendlines started getting smashed like turkeys being thrown from helicopters.
As I sit here now, the last decent down day we had was back on April 7th, and otherwise the market is just grinding higher and higher, in many cases making highs never seen before in human history. I really thought we were done with all this; that, as I put it, “the wind was at our backs.” Well, the central banks learned their lesson in 2008, and they’re not just going to roll over and let market forces take control. No way, no how.
