Warning: Honesty dead ahead. The stuff you don’t see on any other financial site. Because they have too much good sense to be truthful.
Days like today are enough to make me want to curl into the fetal position and just rock back and forth………
It was absolutely miserable. I woke up to a market that was up huge, but I wasn’t suicidal since I was relatively light (65%). As things started to fall to pieces, I kept pushing into attractive looking positions. In short order, my portfolio was zooming. Because this is a very “bespoke” portfolio, it definitely has its own personality, and it was acting like a well-trained runner that was flying down the track.
And then, from the stands, Powell took out his shotgun and blew the legs off my guy. And his legless torso was on the field, bleeding out. The bounce-back (fueled, of course, by absolutely nothing except infinite Fed-Bux) was merciless, and by day’s end I was once again at 65% committed, precisely where I had started. Just even more mentally wounded than before.
What’s interesting, from a charting perspective, is the “traverse” that today’s letter “V” represents. I’ve tinted the /RTY (small caps) below. The green represents the bullish cup-with-handle pattern. At today’s nadir, the /RTY precisely touched the horizontal representing support (in other words, the line dividing the yellow and green zones).
What’s absolutely terrifying is the prospect for an “escape” from the yellow zone. In other words, another bullish breakout above the higher horizontal. It would take almost nothing at all for that to happen. It’s terribly close, and should it transpire, I’ll have to get even less committed than before. I may just go to all cash and say “screw it” until the election.
More likely, I may wind up with just a tiny handful of long-dated put options and no shorts at all. Pathetic, yes, but I’m not really into self-destruction, tempting as it is.
Thus, as I am typing this, I have a mere 27 short positions and 2 long put positions (IWM and XLY, expiring in July and September, respectively). I have 106 individual equities in my Bear Pen, and they are gorgeous patterns, but that treasonous bastard Powell can wreck any pattern, no matter how well-formed. He’s a deeply evil man, and I don’t think I’ve ever despised anyone quite as severely. Not that you asked.
He has wrecked our entire free enterprise system, and the wealth disparity that people have been talking about for years just went worse by an order of magnitude. The Jeff Bezoses and Mark Zuckerbergs of the world are richer than ever, whereas everyone else is going to discover after July 31 (when the juicy unemployment checks run out) that their lives suck even worse than this did before. The buzz of the $1200 shut-your-mouth bribe handed out in April will be a long-spent memory.
It’s just pathetic. What’s next? A return to medieval times when Bezos hires the impoverished to till the soil of his land? Or maybe he could shoot them for sport.
Take heart. I’m sure that the masses of the nation will, sometime in the next 200 years, decide that enough is enough and take matters into their own hands. Given what a charisma-free bore Biden is, I daresay the prospect of political change in November isn’t assured.
Mercifully, what keeps me from slicing my own wrists in a warm bathtub is product development, where I have – – for my own sake, if not yours – – been focusing most of my time. The reaction to Slope Mobile has been great, and we’re hard at work on it. In addition, later this evening, I’m going to roll out another SlopeCharts feature I think you’re going to like. Be sure to check in later.
