What we’ve been saying here for years has now become common knowledge:
The economy and financial markets are disconnected.
Banks will be saved at the expense of all other entities.
Bernanke, etc. will print money, keep interest rates near zero, and perform any and all manipulations possible for their entire tenure.
Inflation must be bought to overcome deflation.
Consumer and Corporate confidence is directly linked to near-term stock market performance. Nothing else carries any statistical significance.
Fixed income, commodity and equity markets are manipulated by Central Banks with full government blessings and that manipulation is widely accepted and in fact required.
The last bastion of the individual investor is through retirement accounts.
There can be no market corrections until after April 15 deadline for retirement account contribution deductibility.
The Democratization of Wall Street is dead and replaced by HFT.
I’m sure that I’m forgetting many important market or structural factors. Please contribute if you can think of any!
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I genuinely think the next time we rollover, into autumn, we don’t V bounce. And, I’ve been expecting/playing every V bottom since 2009. This is truly the fall that breaks the trampoline.
The ECB , china, and US are far too levered. The fire extinguishers have been emptied. Just a “moderate” 15% pullback is enough to start blowing up pension funds and banks left and right.
And , with the endless mideast rumors, there is a possibility we see Dow print under 10k, WITH gas still above 3.50$ a gallon. This winter.
We could be looking at a “grapes of wrath” situation in under a year
Your’s has been the expectation for 3 years running.
Ready for it but not holding my breath…
Scott, I’m trying to figure out the angle on your strategy here.
If all that is left are HFT bots playing with Fed/government/central bank manipulated money, then why would a date based solely on a group of investors that by your statements don’t matter, have any impact on the market?
You may be correct, I just don’t understand it. From my viewpoint, either individual investors still matter, or the date has no meaning.
The market stairsteps up, sort of, with the infusion of IRA money. It’s new money. Makes sense. Then sell in May and go away makes sense too. It should take a few weeks for the new IRA funds to get transmitted and invested. The HFT people just shuffle stuff around for the rest of the year.
Lets put something in perspective, for all the peter schiff types out there
If you bought GDX gold miner sector the day QE2 was declared, and held, you are underwater on it
And, if you loaded up on RJA and DBA food futures back then, you are barely up. So, the “follow the bernanke” trade isn’t nearly as easy as it sounds
I still think we have “sell-in-May” this year, regardless of it being an election year. The reason being that the fat cats just can’t get that concerned with trading during lower volume season when they would rather be on a yacht or private island somewhere.
The human touch will always win in the end. Look at BATS pos, I can’t wait to short it whenever it tries another go around. HFT is in the govt.’s cross hairs. Goldman Sux closed the largest and original HFT “Alpha Fund” it was a dog and only had one exciting year of +40% in 2007 I think. When they shut it down in June of 2011 it was -35%!!! YTD. Up to that point I knew they had huge positions to unwind, but I really do attribute the crazy August-December as that fund battling all the other bots as it exited the salon.
From the Club of Budapest, which provides vision for the United Nations…
http://www.worldshiftnetwork.org/action/subsistence.html
“We support the shift of our economic focus from translational corporate “fusionism” to regional subsistence. Subsistence economy focuses on a “natural” way of living. This is not “back to stone age”. It rather means a spiral, wavelike progress out of the life-destroying habits of today’s so-called civilization and accepting and welcoming the complexity of life.
We support the development of sustainable, decentralized, that is local, high-tech production, combined with local use of local resources. and the redesign of our monetary system according to a fourfold model: 1) economy of gifting (a basic matriarchal feature), 2) counter-trade (barter) economy, 3) complementary local monetary systems for regional trade, and 4) unified currency (for example called “terra”) for interregional and global trade. In our eyes compound interest has to be abolished. Also the concept of “owning” land must be reconsidered.”
———
The plans are public. I see much endless hypothesizing by those who know not where to look.
This means the US dollar is going to collapse and be replaced with another world reserve currency, eventually.
No more compound interest (i.e., the end of investing for profit).
No more private property ownership. I would think martial law will need to be implemented in the US to bag this goal.
Yeah, that’s pretty much it. Get your hoodies and pitchforks ready.
Keep dreaming Taco… Keep dreaming.
While seasonality does exist in the markets, placing so much emphasis on April 15th is beyond foolish. Do you really think it is that easy, year after year, to go long while people are depositing their year end bonuses and tax refunds into the market and then liquidate when tax season ends? This doesn’t work. If it did anyone with an Excel spreadsheet would be a billionaire. But you already knew that.