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The risks of chasing hot stocks can be illustrated with this morning’s Exhibit A, which is Xilinx. This is one of those company which I have no idea what it does, but it has a name like a Hollywood film would give to some made-up Silicon Valley corporation as a villain. Anyway:
Dear God, this market is boring. As I type this, the SPY is up eight hundredths of a single percent. If you’re bored out of your mind, you ain’t alone.
We’re range-bound. I guess there’s just nothing to inspire the market one way or the other. Not only are we in a tiny range, we’re exactly in the middle of the range, which is like a boring cake with boring icing on top.
Note: This is not market analysis. This is a person writing words and inserting some funny pictures. It is a product of said person’s view of psychology and the modern market.
First off, my honest self-evaluation: I would be pleased to see the US stock market to go down again, not because I am positioned for it (I am not, yet, other than through fairly non-dramatic risk management like portfolio balancing, profit taking and keeping high cash levels as appropriate) but because I feel like the bull was cooked up by an evil man named Ben Bernanke.
When I write “the bull” I am not talking about the post-Christmas Eve rally. That had to happen and at the time I was buying the spiking fear and panic. I am talking about the post-2008 bull market.
Regarding Bernanke, evil is probably too strong a word but I consider the effects of his policy to have been purely evil, exponentially enriching the already rich and driving the middle class to the verge of… electing an American TV character who says the right things to those who want, no need to hear those right things after the Bernanke years of abuse (ironically, with the distribution to the rich taking place under a president thought of as a socialist redistributor… only in America). (more…)
I have a rather unique vantage point as the owner of this little corner of the Internet. People from various parts of the world know me by way of Slope as well as my show on tastytrade, and some of the bears among them (God love ’em) consider me their ursine patron saint, so when things are going badly (like, oh, the past six weeks nonstop) they reach out to me.
Well, last night, this is pretty much what I experienced:
We absolutely busted our humps this weekend on SlopeRules, so I’m going to be very focused on testing that. In other words, I won’t be cranking out ten posts a day. More like two or three……….because SlopeRules is (partly) our future.
In the meanwhile, it was fascinating to see the AMZN-like U-turn that GOOGL (retarded real name: Alphabet) performed after the close. Clearly the FANG giants have a trend going these days:
Fear, as measured by the VIX volatility index, is less than half what it was just a month ago. LESS THAN HALF.
