Let us speak of hope, and of wonder, and of mistakes. We’ll start with hope. And Exhibit A in that respect is this cup which I received this morning:
What you see, quite plainly, is a Philz chai, which is pretty much my favorite thing in the world. I get one almost every weekday. It is the gasoline in my engine of life.
Thanks to supply chain issues, I haven’t had a cup of chai in a long time. Not just weeks. But months. And that doesn’t do me any good. There are relatives I haven’t seen in years I miss less than I’ve missed my chai. It’s been a rough time, believe me, and a sad sight every morning to see me fire up my Philz app, try to order it, and then receive the “Shoot, we’re all out of that!” warning.
During this chai drought of the past few months, there were two instances when the app happily took my order, and I figured my nightmare was at an end. In each instance, once I got there, they apologized, told me they had refunded my money, and said they had simply neglected to mark that as Out of Stock when they fired up the computers that morning. They were, in each case, nice enough to give me a complimentary coffee drink by way of apology.
This morning, as you might guess, the app allowed me to place the order, and I did so, fully expecting to wind up with nothing but a free coffee drink in my hands later that morning. Instead, when I walked in, there it was, as pictured above. As you might guess, a chai has never tasted so good. I am very tempted to order thirty of the damned things, deliberately hoarding this precious resource, but I’ll be civil and just hope they manage to not run out of black tea again.
This whole episode reminded me of what happened a few months ago, regarding a bee hive of mine which had been abandoned. I tend to feel things very deeply, for better or worse (usually worse), and when my entire hive left the Knight estate, I took it very personally (just like how I take any membership cancellations VERY personally, like a slap in the face – – so you can imagine my emotions when 9,000 honeybees decided to ditch me).
It was a late February morning, I believe, when I happened to see honeybees flying in and out of that hive. It had been abandoned for many months, and now some bees had made their home there. There are thousands of them now, and I feel like that hive has been resurrected through no effort on my own. I cannot tell you how happy I felt when I first saw the bees return. It’s sad, I suppose, but I felt oddly accepted. And I seriously try to treat all the animals in my domain, from spiders on up, to good lives. The chickens. The dogs. The humans. If you are a spider crawling on the side of the wall, twenty feet up, you will be gently rescued and delivered outside where you belong. Save for flies, there are no deaths in the Knight household.
So the chai meant a lot to me. It gave me a sense of hope, which after last week, is just what I needed.
Now let us consider wonder. And I mean a sense of wonder, almost in a childlike sense.
Some people claim to have seen ghosts. I never have. I have experienced the presence of what I believe are non-corporeal spirits, but only in an audio sense, but I’ve never actually seen anything. If I did, I believe it would radically change my life. I find it hard to believe that someone – – anyone – – could actually witness seeing a supernatural spirit and not devote their lives to trying to figure it out. It seems just to big to ignore.
The nature of time, for example, is something I’ve written about before. I won’t rehash it, but my belief is that our perception of time is completely naïve, and limited to our own flawed perception. I’ve had far too many experiences that contradict our understanding of time to believe otherwise. So I really try to pay attention to my life, because there’s something mysterious here that I truly want to understand better. Want to know my idea of heaven? It isn’t playing a harp on a cloud. It’s simply to comprehend the truth. Which, in a way, a very tiny way, is why I’ve dedicated my life to charting. There’s a mystery to unlock here that I seek to understand.
And the perversion of that magic by inorganic market forces is what makes me so angry about the likes of the FOMC, because they demean the truth through their actions. When we are allowed – – and I use that term very purposely – – to enjoy a more-or-less organic market, then the magic returns. Charts work. And I don’t mean charts “work” because markets go down. The blast-in-the-face-with-a-shotgun that the bears got last week made TOTAL sense, and was utterly and completely in line with the charts.
And thus we enter into the realm of the mistake.
Now, since I’m so good at making mistakes, I’m going to do so right now by even creating this post a mere hour before the opening bell, because I’m going to say some things about the market which might not line up with what the futures do in a very short amount of time. But frankly there is virtually nothing the markets can do between now and the open on Tuesday which will negate what I have to say, so it’s not THAT big a mistake. So here we go………..
At this point, I’m going to lay out my latest views on the market in general for ALL paying members. I am delighted to report that Slope’s membership roster is at an all-time high, and God bless them, not a SINGLE person has cancelled, even with the wretchedness of the past six trading days. If you’d like to join their ranks and give premium a post, please do so by clicking here. Let’s read on with my prediction………..
