The Ursine Toggle

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Greetings from Whole Foods, where I’ve dispatched my son to deal with the shopping, as he has decided to cook dinner for the family tonight. Whole Foods apparently hasn’t spent any of their gigantic profits on their network, since it feels like the entire store is dangling off a shared 2400 baud modem. All the same, I take opportunities to do posts when I can, thus I am banging out this final post of the day.

As an aside, I’ll mention no regret at not being able to watch every moment of the Democratic Convention. Lord in heaven almighty, the Jerry Lewis Telethon was more entertaining. Not only that, but there’s only so much pandering at Hillary-worshiping I can stomach. I love watching politics, but seriously, about five minutes is about all I can take before causing stomach upset.

(I am, however, looking forward to all four of the debates with the same fervor a football fanatic anticipates the Superbowl…………the fervor times twenty, probably).

In case you didn’t notice, the bulls are large and in charge of this market. It’s too bad, because I think it teaches our society a bad lesson. Between Hillary and the bull market, it’s quite apparent that not only does crime pay, but it pays exceptionally well. I had naively thought early this year that maybe the party was over for the bulls. Nope. It was just a brief, multi-week respite from over seven years of unrelenting hell. And the post-Brexit rally, of course, was pretty much the final nail in the coffin.

What, then, would it take for the bears to have a fighting chance, even if just for a few weeks? Here’s my guess:

(a) Oil needs to matter – oil has been slaughtered since June 9th. Percentage-wise, it would be like the Dow falling nearly 4,000 points. There was a time that equities followed oil closely. As it is now, equities don’t seem to care that much. Even energy issues haven’t been affected to any large degree.

(b) Trump strength – look, I think a Trump presidency could be ruinous for the country and even dangerous to mankind, but God in heaven it would be fun to watch. If this man looks like he has a chance at winning, you can expect equities to absolutely lose their minds.

(c) Green trees stop mattering – remember “green shoots”? Back in the Spring of 2009, even the tiniest bit of not-that-terrible news got equities excited, because they were so incredibly cheap that the market was just dying for a reason to go long. Well, the green shoots are really, really, really old at this point, and they resemble very tall trees instead. Simply stated, the half-life of good news needs to get really short, so that it becomes evident to people that the happiness is already built into the stock price (as I am looking at Facebook this evening, a taste of this is happening in miniature during after-hours trading after their blowout earnings report):

FB

I’m sure I could think of other reasons, but that’s enough for now (and stuff like “nuclear warfare”, I’ve given up on offering, since everything seems to be spun as bullish anyway).