How nice to wake up to a full five-day working week. No special Albanian Cabbage God celebration. No federally-sanctioned time off due to Pansexual Awakening Month. None of it. Just good old work.
It would be nicer if the steady burn-off in prices that took place all through Sunday night had held on, but no, the magical Midnight hour arrived, and it all went away. I also saw that Squirrel mentioned a “special rebalancing” that was mysteriously announced by the NASDAQ, clearly with the hope of propping up nominal index data for the sake of Ma & Pa Kettle retail investors.
My focus is on the /RTY, as the IWM is the only instrument against which I own puts. The range I’ve highlighted below is key. If we can just break below that red horizontal line, things can start getting spicy again.
The /ES, on a longer time scale than the first chart’s, has had a short-term double top.
I expect the market to meander for today and Tuesday, since the Next Big Lurch we’re all waiting for is the CPI. It seems almost a foregone conclusion that it will just keep slipping, which will be celebrated as good news. A year from now, when we’re in a deflationary collapse, the government will be begging to have inflation back, but for now, people are embracing the slide.
As a side note, I’ve been indulging myself in re-reading one of my 800-page history books, this one being the survey of America from 1945 to 1974. It’s a real pleasure to explore what was going on during those decades, in spite of the fact that the author feels compelled to shove the words “grand expectations” into every chapter wherever he can. What I can say is that the political discord described within the book doesn’t feel that different than the divide we are going through today. Some things are eternal.
