Risk On/Risk Off behaviour still seems to dominate. The former still seems to be in the ascendance. I felt like shorting a few of the more obvious fraudulent enterprises, but they are just the ones the rocket up at any hint of a recovery. It really doesn’t seem to be possible to make money on the short side outside of a bear market, and these never seem to persist for more than a couple of weeks nowadays. At some point, maybe, the Fed put will stop functioning, but it’s still going strong right now.

It has gone one for so long now, it hardly seems worth commenting on, but having US markets (particularly the NASDAQ) hitting all-times highs when the Atlanta Fed GDP now service is estimating a 50% drop in GDP (annualized) is beyond incomprehensible, to me at least.

The fact that there are race riots in the US and that the US seems to be on the point of breaking off diplomatic relations with China over it’s Hong Kong seems to be brushed off. See this article, for example. And the fact that China seems to prefer to import its soybeans from Brazil rather than from the USA, despite Trump negotiating the ‘greatest deal ever’ for US farmers a few months ago.

This article explains why all the evidence points to the SPX going down. All the evidence, except what actually is happening to it. It’s worth watching out for Transports and Financials. Vol is still down, as I know to my cost.

Everyone (!) seems to be forecasting that the EUR will go up against the dollar, because the EU is moving to become a transfer union, now that the pesky Brits are out of the way. That, and unless the Frugal Five (or Four) northern states agree to Italy et al. being bailed out the whole edifice will come crashing down, something that nobody in Europe wants (maybe apart from Victor Orban). I am not so convinced maybe Italy will get saved, but will this benefit the EUR overall: I’m not so sure. My preference would be the bombed out markets in Latin America. They make all sorts of commodities (like food) which we will still need, even in the depths of a depression.

Stocks I hold: KL (via options), VALE, FRO, GLD, STNG. Market positioning, every so slightly short, as of Friday. Measured by my less-than-perfect-market exposure algorithm. General positioning is market neutral, a bit of exposure to commodities, teeny short positions in very egregious fraud stocks.

I should give a shout out to unicornbay.com, which I find invaluable for estimating betas. Just go to the tools page.