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I am composing this post on Tuesday night, late into my flight back home. Say what you will about Bear Force One, but it came through. The last day of the horrible two-month countertrend rally was August 16th. My departing flight was August 17th. Bang. BFO for the win.
Let’s start off with a simple fact: out of 100,000 people, you’ll find maybe one true bear among them. There’s hardly anyone that’s ever going to posit a bearish argument about the stock market, because they have no vested interest in doing so. Not the carnival barkers on CNBC. Not the equity-pushers from Goldman Sachs, And, God knows, never, ever from any Wall Street analyst. 365 days out of every year, their message is the same: “Buy, Buy, and Buy some more.”
Thus, it is no surprise that we’re seeing a particular “fact‘ being pushed onto the public, stating in no uncertain terms that there has never been an instance in the history of the universe when a market has recovered more than 50% of its price plunge and failed to soar forward into a new bull market. I am seeing this argument absolutely slathered all over Twitter………..
Please note this vitally important retracement level on IWM. We peaked on November 8th, ground our way down lower through June 16th (eight months of bearish deliciousness!) and then have spent the past two months in this hellish, awful, horrific counter-trend rally, which has just about nailed the major Fibonacci level to the penny.
I have been, as perhaps some of you, torturing myself over what I could have done differently on June 16th. That was, of course, the market’s bottom so far, and a perfect time to get rid of EVERY short and go ENTIRELY long.
As it stands now, the Fibonacci retracements are totally clear, and I look and think to myself, “What kind of moron would have held on when the Fib was getting hit like that?” And then I wonder to myself, was I even WATCHING these same retracement levels? Maybe I’m being too hard on myself.
Turns out………...nope, I’m not being hard ENOUGH on myself. I had identified these exact levels long before the bottom, and I went and reviewed my posts from June 13-17, right when the market was bottoming, and I knew EXACTLY WHAT WAS GOING ON, and I said EXACTLY WHAT I SHOULD DO.
Did I do it? No. Why? Because I’m a goddamn idiot, in spite of being a brilliant chartist. Ugh!
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