At last, a morning where everything isn’t bright green.
That’s the magic of scale, though. The above chart looks like my kind of dream market, but you know as well as I do that it simply shows the /ES in recent hours falling a fraction of a percent. On a more meaningful time scale, all we’re doing is grinding away at the upper bounds of an agonizing range that’s been in place since Mamie Eisenhower was seriously being considered for the cover of the Sports Illustrated swimsuit edition. (Oh, but how far we’ve come).
Tomorrow afternoon will be the first tidbit of excitement in weeks, since Nvidia will be announcing earnings. I don’t follow the stock closely, but my understanding is that the business is actually shrinking, but there’s so much fervor about how AI is going to solve every problem in the whole world that the stock is enjoying the mother-of-all-bubbles. Pop Nvidia, and this entire house of cards collapses.
It occurred to me, however, that I can often look back on times in my life and wonder how on Earth I ever got through it. I’ve recently been wailing about dealing with the past two months, and my bitching is reaching a crescendo with this debt ceiling insanity. Then I ask myself: two months? You and Slope survived the two YEARS of 2020 and 2021, so surely you’re going to get through this all right.
I will point out something a bit obscure worth mentioning, which is the well-formed diamond pattern in the Dow Utilities. Who cares, you ask? Check back in a year.
As for my own positioning, I would characterize it as “disgusted and light.” In specifics:
- 12 put positions on equities
- 2 put positions on ETFs (IEFA and SMH)
- Earliest expiration is in 87 days, with an average of 145 days
- 15.3% cash
- Refusing to really get into trading in any meaningful way until the stupid debt ceiling thing is done
I’ll close by saying that it’s puzzling to me how lofty the market is, since it seems to be accepted as a universal truth that the WORST thing for the bulls would be a debt ceiling deal. Everyone seems to think that it would signal some kind of amazing buying opportunity to have Yellen raise $700 billion to refill her coffers, sucking all that money out of the market.
It’s puzzling, I must say.
