This pretty well sums up why I haven’t done anything over the last month. I don’t trust anything or anyone right now, other than a comfy 60% cash position and my own nerves.

And if I have to sit on that cash position for a year, doing nothing much at all, then watch me.

You should generally presume that the future will behave averagely from the present. But there are times when you are confronted with the extraordinary; times like the 3rd most significant decline in a key commodity on record. And when those times happen, you should chuck the ordinary and assume you are living in extraordinary times.

We saw the tech sector get run through last spring. Then the oil space. What comes next? Wherever we are, it’s best to believe that it will be anything but average.

After all, nothing else has been.

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Greetings from the 9th floor and allow me to talk non-finance for a while. We’ve been chewing on this tape long enough to have earned a break.

Months ago I swore to Madame Thaler that I would be a more involved family sort the last few months. It’s not that I was ever an uninvolved man; only that I promised to apply extra efforts to attending events and seeing loved ones who we had only occasioned with in the past few years. We let the children of our extended family come stay over night and entertained them with trips to water parks and zoos. We doted on the youngsters. We entertained and visited often.

The effort reaps dividends and I recommend you try it if you find yourself isolated from your clan. Our kin are one of those special associations that almost always enhance our quality of life. Sure spending time takes away from business affairs, but why are you working so hard anyway? A common answer is, “for others”.

But the others would rather you be a part of their lives. The great man or woman is one who can apply himself or herself in both fields of life (often at the expense of their own personal time – work and family are exhausting).

Naturally some of you are estranged from your families. I would not tell you to reconnect; plenty of those estrangements are for good reason. But find yourself a family all the same and exercise yourself to include them in your thoughts and life.

It’s difficult to organize these events and often it falls on you (as the enterprising up-and-coming) to make it all come together. But when you finally are surrounded by people you haven’t seen in years, the cost seems so negligible. It is a very rewarding experience.

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Enough with the bounces, always bringing us back just enough to get beaten to death tomorrow. This process is faulty and needs to be jettisoned, either through rapacious upside action, or else total breakdown. Death by a thousand paper cuts is always far worse to the system over time. It breeds mistrust; nothing like a good and quick beating to clean a mans mind and the slate.

The market is being controlled by the weak and fretful. Cowards are not permitted to lead for long; buying the day and selling the close – as a strategy – must be swiftly punished through conviction moves either up or down, less the whole crowd be given over to that sort of silliness.

I would gladly accept a little more panic weakness, if the tradeoff is the bankruptcy of the intraday traders. Just to get them off the board.

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Look we can sit here and try and play “Guess What People Are Thinking”, but I sort of feel that the game is a waste of time at this point. The room for psychoanalysis is well past. We’re selling off hard again and that’s all there is to it.

I had hoped – hoped – that we were near some sort of bottom. But obviously nobody took the time to guess the true impact of watching the EURUSD collapse by 20%. So now we’re going to get more face punching. It’s really that simple.

The strong dollar is going to be a huge boon for savers. Unfortunately, there aren’t any of those in America.

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Maybe I’ll start writing weekly columns about the up and coming developments in the cash sector. I could, for instance, average together all the serial numbers on my cash, and then run countless back testing to see if that number modulo 7 correlates to the S&P 500 (pitch destroyer: it doesn’t, but I’ll have a super catchy title anyway).

Perhaps I will start a new publication to go along with my columns, and call it Cash Weekly. We could discuss the new emerging colors of cash or just pay cartoonists to draw amusing characters over the top of our legal tender’s portraits.

I could always do an in depth review of up and coming US destroyers, and how they pertain to stuffing our cash down the throats of the third world? Or why I’d rather own dollars than euros or rubles? I could dedicate an entire column to other uses for cash, such as mattress stuffing or alternative clothing fabric.

Sorry for the lull; you see, I’m sitting on quite a lot of the stuff at the moment and it is really boring, even though it’s also the right move here.

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I am going to lay 2014 bare, fairly and without playing pretty. 2014 was an enormous lost opportunity and, indeed, and calamity of masterful proportions. I do this to put it behind me, log it, and prepare to rise above it.

2014, I ended down 33%.

2014 started out as one for the history books. After pacing 28% in 2013, my book exploded to the upside (and by no means was that an exaggeration, if you were following my positions). I had such a hot hand, with names like BAS and HCLP doubling in a matter of months.

I sat out the tech sector carnage in the spring, unaffected by it. I made money even as others languished.

And what may come as a surprise, I actually called the selloff in both oil and the underlying stocks. In August, penning a self-reflecting piece on how disconnected I was from the real world, up 25% for the year while others were holding on for dear life, I deduced that I should sell out of much of my holdings, if only to reorganize and one up fate.

Then, what may be equally surprising – no, the next sentence is not “why didn’t I listen to myself!?” or equally stupid nonsense – I did sell out of half of my oil and energy positions.

That’s what makes this story so strange. I liquidated BAS from a 25% holding down to 10%. I dropped HCLP from almost 30% to 15%. I trimmed everything. I had 50% cash riding into this bloodbath.

And it still didn’t help.

Yes, I was buying the drop at intervals, but that only accounts for a fraction of the total damage. Maybe somewhere between 5-10%. The other 20-25% mutilation was from 10-15% positions dropping 50%-90% in the span of 90 days or less…

To quote the late J. Ogden Armour, whom I ominously wrote about just before it all happened, “I lost money so fast, I didn’t think it was possible.”

That is it; it’s all on the table. 2014, the year that should have been. Where I let a 25% gain turn into a 33% loss, and more or less had my balls cut off in public.

Good riddance 2014! I hope Venezuela at least collapses totally, as some sort of fucked up consolation prize.

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