I actually had a pretty good day today. The only reason I had a pretty good day today is because I sold a bunch of ES when it was at about 880. The market closed down hard again, so the account holding that ES short did well. My really big account – – the super giant one – – has an even balance of long and short positions, and in spite of being a very large dollar value account, it closed down $300, which is basically unchanged. Ridiculous.

There are plenty of great technical reasons to go long this market – Gary Savage has laid them out extremely well – but I'm getting the feeling that Gary and others with similar dispositions are in the same boat I was back in the middle of 2007 – – – that is, absolutely right about their point of view, but not having the market cooperate. I know exactly what that feels like. There is chart after chart after chart showing why the market show explode higher (even within the context of a multi-year bear market), but it simply isn't doing it.

The reason is pretty obvious; we are headed for a depression, and there is no reason to buy stocks. Unemployment is going to soar. Prices are going to collapse. Crime is going to rapidly escale. Even the survival of the United States in the form we know it today is at stake (and I can't see how it can survive). So why in God's name would people buy stocks?

But there are plenty of stupid people out there, and by God, we need their help. I am serious about this. Without them bidding up stocks (naively thinking that the bottom is in), we bears aren't going to have any real fun again. Where's Ben Stein when you need him? Where's AJC? What about Elaine Garzarelli?

Again, I'm serious about this. Where as the permabulls? Where are the optimists? We can't fleece anyone without anyone to fleece. This market is nearly impossible to trade. I wish people would take leave of their senses again. I miss that.

I apologize, everyone, for Slope being down for an hour. Ironically, one of the network engineers here said he was going to take it down "for a moment" in order to improve reliability and uptime. Obviously it didn't work out that way.

In any case, I've asked him to reserve such activities in the future to non-trading hours. We are going to put Slope on multiple servers in order to improve reliability. Again, sorry for the downtime.

I really enjoy the links people post in comments; this one stood out for me as a timely and relevant read about what the forthcoming depression will be like (to be fair, the article is about what it would be like, but I prefer to phrase it as what it will be like, since I feel a catastrophic worldwide depression is absolutely inevitable).

What else is there to say? What a mess! Anyone who can trade this market profitably has my respect. Holding on to your profits with sensible hedging is probably the most honorable thing to do at this point.

Barring something utterly unforeseen, like a terrorist attack, I think we've got a pretty clean range right now, and we're on the lower side of it (which gives me a short-term bullish bias). The chart I mainly watch is:

I have a ton of great longs, and I've got a ton of great shorts. Being on both sides of the fence is going to mute both my profits and my losses, because no market is going to be friendly to both longs and shorts at the same time, no matter how carefully selected they are.

Get the S&P back to about 1050, and there will be no stopping us (that is, it will be a great time to short). Until then, boring old care & prudence need to hold sway. I have many more good trading ideas, and I will continue to deploy small bits of capital into those positions as we ride out this Storm of Uncertainty. I will share those ideas as grist for the Slope mill, as the days grind on.