NASDAQ Closes Flat in Grindhouse Session

If you snoozed you missed it. The early morning tech led rally and subsequent collapse with the Ukraine news followed by a nonsensical recovery based upon hope. Here we have a day of chop and if you played it wrong, like me, you lost.

While the NASDAQ closed flat, all stocks were appreciably lower — with the Stocklabs 4000 index closing down 0.8%. I had opened the day down, following being up 2% pre-market, and then I dove back into the tape and lost — due to my short exposure in TZA and UVXY. All in all, I think I have a good position — heavily long commodities and hedged with a small cap short and volatility long. There is always a chance peace can break out, even if for a period of a few days. That’s all the market really needs — one or two days of +500 NASDAQS to ruin a perfectly good short position. But then there’s also the specter of the Fed going gangbusters with rate hikes and how it might deleteriously effect the economy. In short, we are only 1 year into the Biden administration and it’s only gonna get worse.

On the bright side, perhaps everything will work out the way we want it to, without death, pain, suffering, and division. It seems, if we’re being honest here, the world is in a very dark place now, bereft of love and light and this manifestation is seen in how we price things in the market. Things have been broken for more than a year and the feeling is of continuation with this trend, instead of some sort of reversion against the mean.