The situation in Greece has almost no tragic elements, despite what lazy headline writers would have you think. Rather, the situation in Greece is an existentialist black comedy, and we should act accordingly.

Let’s be clear here: no individuals are “holding the world economy hostage” or are going to plunge us into doom due to their personal character flaws. This is a very stupid and lazy argument akin to the “No WW2 without Hitler” hypothesis, which totally ignores all the structural conditions that made these figures relevant to begin with. The actors now have become personifications of certain policy approaches and even more than that, faux-moral positions. You will never get very far with predictive politics if you insist that a certain faction is willfully evil: the average  person who believes “Obama is a closet pacifist-communist-muslim” would have done pretty poorly if asked to predict his response to the events of the past four years in concrete numbers, not in retarded feelings propaganda terms.

So, no one here is evil, nearly everyone is acting either indirectly or directly in good faith to do what they believe will be best and most workable. Unfortunately, these ideas are at odds with one another and they can’t all be correct.

I’m increasingly getting the feeling that we’re going to see another deadlock in the Greek election, which will lead to another month of mixed bad news, choppy markets, and starry-eyed bullish optimism.  My back of the envelope predictions are some what hampered by 1) not being Greek 2) not being able to read Greek 3) not having any contacts in Greece who aren’t hopeless alcoholics and 4) polling blackout for the last two weeks. Still, here are the numbers as I see them:

SYRIZA: 26-31%

New Democracy: 28-32%

Pasok: 10-12%

Communists: 6-10%

Independent Greeks (right-wing anti-austerity, conspiracy theory, anti-politic s, light fascism):  6-10%

Greens, golden dawn, actual independents, etc etc.:  about 10% for all of them in total.

There’s a sliightly smaller chance of Syriza taking 35% and forming a “government of the left” successfully, but really for anyone to come out with a majority there will be some pretty strange coalitions that are not going to last long or inspire much confidence.

So, now I’m drawing on all of your collective wisdom and foolishness: what would be some of the better equities to long/short/buy or sell options in that would show the greatest gains from a deadlocked election or an unconvincing Syriza victory?  SPY puts, short eurofunds and shorting greek stuff seems too obvious, and I’m not sure what FAZ et. al will do, and I’m not sure if a deadlock will cause a big plunge down or just keep the chop going?

So, irrespective of your own predictions, what are the investment vehicles, equities, and tactics that could be used here to produce a better return than broad brush “Betting entire market goes up” and “Betting entire market goes down”  stuff?

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