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.
On top of that, the last 7 years (!) have not been kind at all to bears, so you’d expect a phalanx of jack-offs to be attacking me on a regular basis, castigating me for being on the wrong side of history for so long.
However, this simply isn’t the case. The quantity of hate mail I get is almost too small to measure. For every few hundred nice, grateful, polite, complimentary emails I get, I’ll get one nasty one. Over the years, I’ve received countless thousands of emails and tweets from traders all over the planet, and they are almost all pleasant.
But this week was different. On Monday, I got my first email. I wouldn’t call it a “hate” email necessarily, but the guy had lost a lot of money shorting since mid-February, and he thought I’d be a good scapegoat for his trading. Then on Tuesday I got another email, which was straight-up nasty. Absolutely foul-tempered and mean-spirited. And then today, bang, a third one. I’ll be civil and obfuscate the identifies of these dorks, even though I know the names and locations of all three of them. I suspect they, umm, live alone.
Now, I’ve got to be clear on this: nothing like this has ever happened. Like I said, I might get one mean email every six months or so. But three in a row, in less than a week? Never! (Oh, and to answer that j.d.r. fellow, no, I’m not going to “give it up.” I didn’t get to where I am by being a quitter.)
I bring this up because the post I did yesterday generated a lot of positive response, tweets, and emails. It struck a chord with a lot of folks, particularly long-suffering bears like yours truly. But by opening myself up the way I did (and the way I so often do, which is a hallmark of Slope), I likewise open myself up to obnoxious attacks from others.
This is, incidentally, not a solicitation for “Ignore the haters!” emails from you, because it’s clear to me that a lot of Slopers are protective of my sensitive soul, but honestly, the three evil emails are far more intriguing to me than upsetting. Wouldn’t it be poetic if the arrogant bullish zeitgeist which compelled this trio to attack me was some kind of marker for a major top?
Of course, there have been hundreds of times when I’ve thought “this is it! it’s finally here!” only to be disappointed, but I at least thought it was fitting that after the close we started to see more cracks in the pavement.
I’m going to keep fighting the good fight. As hard as all of this has been, I believe with every molecule of my being that you cannot print your way to prosperity, and the longer they delay things, the more calamitous the disaster the central bankers are going to witness blowing up in their baggy, craggy faces. In the meantime, as I issue forth this post from the Centurion Lounge in SFO, I’m doing just fine.
