One gentleman wrote to me, prompted by my Best of 2023 post. I thought it was a tremendous email, and he kindly gave me permission to share it with everyone here. Minor edits and emphasis are by me for clarification.
Hi Tim,
Read your post today and it struck me as a very sad moment, I would just say I’m frankly amazed you have lasted this long both shorting the market and providing the web site and videos on Tastytrade .Your daily videos are an absolute pleasure to watch for anyone wanting a snapshot of the markets.
Like you I started trading over twenty years ago and have become more and more sickened at what I see every day and especially when the market tries to correct the manipulation and is then manipulated even more. I believe that now we will never have real markets ever again, it is now a centrally planned economy with centrally planned bond and stock markets, “they” have complete control over EVERYTHING.
If you think about it, in 2020 the world shut down and the NASDAQ hardly dropped 30%, they printed trillions of dollars and saved the market again, so everyone expects them to do just the same every time, Two videos were made and put on YouTube after the GFC, that said the Fed would never let the market go down again, and anyone following the advice in them would now be a millionaire.
What makes it even worse is the gloating by people I work with who keep pointing out the new highs in house prices and share prices after I have been predicting crashes in both for over ten years, these people are morons who know nothing about economics, stock markets, finance or technical analysis and yet they think they are the smartest people in the room and just love pointing out their gains and obviously my losses by refusing to participate. These people are the ones rewarded by the current system and made to look successful and intelligent, those who point out the fraud and lies are punished.
I have seen literally hundreds of videos on YouTube by people predicting the end of this madness and the final crash and reset, and slowly they became less and less and are now largely gone, not conspiracy theorists or people trying to generate hits, these are respected professionals who have decades of knowledge and experience who have also been made to look like fools by this rotten corrupt system.
I always remember Hugh Hendry and Russell Clark who both shut their funds down, throwing in the towel years ago when they realized the markets weren’t behaving “normally” and were consistently being beaten down by rising prices. I don’t think Galbraith had decades in mind when he made his famous quote about markets remaining irrational long after you become insolvent do you? Hendry is now running a luxury hotel in St. Barts. I’m not sure but Clark is running an investment newsletter.
I saw several videos recently with Mike Green who explained the incessant bid for equities was as a result of both 401K’s and ETF’s (leading to an artificial concentration in certain index stocks) investment that leads to a permanent floor under the market every month regardless of fundamentals, valuations or the economic outlook, add into that the plunge protection scheme and now mom and pop who have been conditioned by decades of interventions and endless bubbles to think they have to join the madness.
This is now I believe, leading to the current phase of the stock market bubble which is going to prove our mutual nemesis David Hunter right. IF you think he’s wrong look at the charts of housebuilders especially TOL and PHM that look like they are in the early stages of a bubble to me – not even close to any kind of a top. I saw a video on YouTube recently by a Miami realtor pointing out the insane prices of properties and the manipulations by housebuilders to keep prices elevated.
Even David Hunter thinks it is all going to blow up when the S&P gets to 7,000 and says it will then drop 80% – but will it????, How low will the Fed let it go before re-starting QE and lowering rates to zero again???, Next time I’ve seen predictions of their balance sheet having to go to $20-30trn to prevent the next stock market collapse, this will probably lead to 20-30% annual inflation, but who the hell is going to stop them?
You might be right and it could all end next week, next month or perhaps the sell the news event when the Fed eventually cuts rates, but then they will I believe try and hold their nerve until the pressure from Wall St and DC just gets so great they fold and it starts all over again. That’s why I think they want to bring in CBDC’s – to enable them to impose negative rates in order to maintain the bubbles by stealing outright people’s money – not even trying to hide it with fake inflation numbers – they will just take your money on deposit in an account.
All the best for 2024 and beyond, but I think I’ll sit this one out (currently all in US treasuries) waiting for a possible top to short………you never know.
