Wolf Richer, who I’ve found particularly enlightening of late, has announced that he’s gone short of SPX I, Who Hates Shorting, Just Shorted the Entire Stock Market. Here’s Why . I wish him luck. It’s very hard to make money by shorting. You’d generally do a lot better by selecting an investment by drawing random Scrabble letters. But we’ve got to such a crazy state of the market, with the Nasdaq hitting all time highs as US unemployment is about to hit 20%, that it has to make sense, even if I’m too chicken to do it.

The Credit Bubble Bulletin, in spite of it’s low-tech web presence, is a great summary of what has been happening in the markets over the previous week. It produces a new report every day, but only in link form. Doug Noland, the author brings everything together in a text report every week. The interesting thing about last week was how uninteresting it was. Neither equity nor FI markets budged very much. Covid is still a serious problem. Economic stats are still full of doom and gloom, although slightly less of these than in the recent past. A lot of people are saying that we’re at a turning point. It’s certainly the case that for smooth functions, the extremum is characterized by the rate of change dropping to zero. Even if this is true, there is still time to act. I am still cross about Wirecard, or more specifically that although I almost knew it was a Ponzi scheme, I made a lot less money out of it than the bulls. I think it has gone down, but in this market it will probably end up as one of Davey Day Trader Global picks from his bag of Scrabble letters, and shoot back up.

In this market, it seems safe to keep out, or at best sell some vol, hedging out the equity exposure.

John Bolton’s book got a lot of coverage in the weekend papers. How anyone can think it’s news that someone close to Trump has concluded that he’s stunningly ignorant and unsuited to be the POTUS is beyond me. How John Bolton could have been unaware of this before he accepted the job of US National Security Advisor is also beyond me.