I’m getting ready to board Bear Force One for my return flight home, so I wanted to compose a post to give me some breathing room before I get tied up with the tasks of doing so. I’ve got 25 short positions presently, one of which is an options position: long October 17th puts on the DIA (Dow Industrials ETF). The /YM, the futures representing the Dow, have been rather spasmodic over the past day, reversing direction once they move any meaningful amount up or down. Broadly speaking, it’s heading the right way inasmuch as it’s weakening.
Over the course of 2025, the /YM has hung out in this 44,000-ish zone before, stalling out for many weeks before finally succumbing to the grim forces of gravity and fiscal reality. I’m obviously hoping it does a repeat performance.
Its brother, the /NQ futures, was at lifetime highs only days ago, but it has shed about a thousand points in short order (prompting permabull Zerohedge, of course, to parrot the words of their mega-investment-bank masters and shriek that everyone should buy the dip). What would be awfully helpful on the part of the /NQ would be to slip below the red line, which demarks the prior peak.
Of course, what everyone seems to be waiting for is the mewing of Powell at Jackson Hole tomorrow morning. I’m not so sure this is the pivotal event everyone expects. The Bernanke speech in 2009 was earth-shaking, but ever since then, as the event markers in SlopeCharts plainly indicate below, the Jackson Hole “event” doesn’t seem to matter to the market much one way or another.
