The Art Of The Implosion

Fake trade deals, imploding economy, 2009-level monetary easing, $1 trillion deficit, institutions dumping stock, insiders cashing out, presidential impeachment. 

There is only dumb money left in Trump Casino:

"On the bright side: That was a period which preceded the buying era of a lifetime for stock market participants."


That was a period that preceded a -50% sell-off

The fake trade deal high is already wearing off:

"The Dow gave up 200 of its 500-point gain in the final half hour as markets realized there was a cessation of tariff hikes but no clear timeline for removal of the existing tariffs"

“The cold war will not go away just because there is a truce in the tariff war.”


“Tariffs have been the tip of the spear in Trump’s trade wars...The next fronts — capital flows, [more] export controls, supply chain duress, industrial policy — are the global plumbing of the real economy.”

The impact of this next round in the trade wars, Krueger said, “can produce exogenous shocks to the global system that can dwarf the tariffs.”

The most expensive lie in U.S. history:

"Trade wars are good and easy to win"

https://www.policyuncertainty.com/trade_uncertainty.html

The cyanide-laced Kool-Aid of record trade war risk, oncoming recession, and monetary heroin is reaching maximum potency. Central banks have done their level best at keeping gamblers in the casino, as risk grew inexorably. Why that is so good is not for me to say; however, beyond Trump's re-election, a lot is riding on central banks right now aka. "Everything". Too bad gamblers have been front-running central banks all year long. Because contrary to popular belief that means the next widely anticipated monetary bailout will only come AFTER the crash.

Which is why this is all just imagined reality:

"I bought for the trade war, but I stayed for the recession"

Aside from the trade war impacted stocks, the locus of implosion remains the Nasdaq. Which is about to get a ton of new insider (lockup expiration) supply compliments of Wall Street's pump and dump:

"Shares of 30 recently public companies become eligible for selling between now and the end of this year."

Each selloff in the IPO complex has been accompanied by a selloff in the S&P:

Investors Business Daily

The Big Picture, Wednesday

"Volume on the NYSE and Nasdaq came in well below Tuesday's levels, continuing a trend in recent weeks of higher-volume declines followed up by lower-volume gains."

Pronounced distribution like this makes it a challenging environment to say the least for growth investors. Stocks just have a hard time making headway amid persistent institutional selling."

Hedge fund top holdings aka. momentum stocks

Are three wave corrective

As we didn't learn in 2008 via the Big Short - in securitized markets credit risk is binary. One week they're refinancing bankrupt companies, the next week they're not. This is the beginning of the credit crisis today's pundits have been saying doesn't exist. 

Trade war ecstasy pushed Apple to a new all time high this week. A necessary and sufficient condition for Trump Casino reversal of fortune:

The Walls Are Closing In On Donny

The bilious septic tank that is Trump's crime-riddled business life is backing up into the White House, while copious useful idiots shred their credibility lying non-stop in defense of criminality. Trump is the sum total endgame for decades of Banana Republican fraud and failure. To say that history won't be kind, is a ludicrous understatement. The ill-fated reign of I, Clownius aka. "The Joker" is coming to a most ignominious ending. Proving my caveat: humility or humiliation, choose one...

"One minute I held the key

Next the walls were closed on me

And I discovered that my castles stand

Upon pillars of salt and pillars of sand"

Way back in September 2008, markets tanked after the Lehman bankruptcy but then stabilized as policymakers scrambled to conjure up a bailout. The market rallied hard into the October TARP vote, and then collapsed once it finally passed. Just like this imaginary trade deal, it was too little, too late...

"It was all going so well"

The only thing holding this market up right now are weak handed bears covering their shorts. Things are so bad right now with the economy and earnings that shorting this market has now become the consensus hedge fund trade. Which ironically has held the casino aloft even as major institutions sell major amounts of stock. Be that as it may, here we see via retail positioning, that each high in the market is attended by weaker and weaker sentiment. This is a tired market. 

The current peak in sentiment matches the peak from last December:

80% of trading is now carried out by computers with artificial intelligence. The rest is carried out by humans with artificial intelligence.

Like today's zombies, computers don't care about valuations or P/E ratios. These are technically driven cybernetic organisms that are almost entirely momentum driven.

Which is what makes them so dangerous. Whatever direction the market is heading in, they exacerbate the move. They excel at steamrolling weak-conviction bears, as they are doing today ahead of the fake trade deal. 

Like most people we know, computer algos will believe anything and anyone - even Donald Trump. Which is why they keep falling for the exact same lie over and over again. This is the 13th round of trade talks in 18 months, for anyone keeping track at home.

The Dow and S&P are the same - three wave corrective at two degrees of trend.

A cascading waterfall crash in real-time. Bought with both hands (lower pane):

"Believe me. Good things are almost beginning to happen soon"

The Nasdaq is weaker than the Dow and S&P. Notice the index double tagged the 200 day before breaking above the 50 dma (blue line), at wave 2 (red). That is called a "running flat" in Elliot Wave parlance. Sign of a very weak bounce in which a and c waves both have the same origin.

Within Tech, internets are the weakest - FANG stocks in particular (Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, Google). 

All are being investigated globally and fined repeatedly for crimes related to fucking up society. 

Notice correlation in the lower pane. For the past year, these stocks have been machine precision correlated to the S&P. 

Here is oil as of yesterday's close:

Herein lies the problem, this is the largest coordinated central bank bailout since 2009 - larger than 2016.

Yet as we see, neither commodities nor deflation have rallied.

It's a failed bailout. Monetary policy is no longer affecting the underlying economy.

Gamblers have bought recession with both hands.

The inconvenient truth, ignored by all-knowing zombies, is that the bull market ended a year ago. Only a fraction of stocks have made new all time highs in that timeframe - almost entirely recession stocks, software stocks, and recent IPO junk.

Here we see the average U.S. stock versus the S&P 500.

Only algos could achieve this kind of black magic:

Here we see the two year Russell 2000 top is essentially complete

Dow Transports left the party a year ago. Which means that Dow theory never confirmed the most recent Dow highs in 2019.

Which is why the divergence between rails and trucking is the widest since October 2008:

Be that as it may, even the rails are rolling over now:

Very few stocks making new highs today. Discount retailers however are having a great run. Because that's all people can afford nowadays.

Why go out when you can stay home and enjoy cheap tequila on the linoleum?

Instant Gratification Is The New Religion

People tell me all the time, "It's always been this way". I always tell them, it's never been this way, you've been desensitized to insanity. Now you think it's normal...

Corporate values have supplanted traditional religious values by hijacking the traditional method - brainwashing. For those wondering how to reduce their personal carbon footprint the fastest way possible, drinking the Kool-Aid is the most efficient method.

Consumer choice.

Ironically, but not surprisingly, those most accustomed to brainwashing are the ones who've been most susceptible to corporate indoctrination. What was once valued as altruism, honesty, compassion, gratitude and humility, has been swapped out for greed, gluttony, narcissism, non-stop lying, and arrogance. Religion is now a consumption good like everything else, not meant to make the world a better place, merely meant to make us feel better about the world falling apart in real-time. How many lives could have been saved had we been teaching people to think for themselves instead of placing their blind faith in conformity? How many souls?

Useful carbon refers to someone who has given themselves over to corporate euthanasia. What once was a 100 year life has now been dwindled down to a 50 year life in terms of quality life expectancy. Sure, some addicts may live longer than the corporate half-life, but they won't live well. Corporate addiction is rampant across social media, iphones, vaping, internet porn, video games, ultra-violence, junk food, alcohol; and let's not forget the most common and lethal addiction: monetary heroin, source of all asset bubbles. This soul-killing corporate monoculture is a black hole of humanity that does not discriminate. Sucking in as many souls as it can get and discarding them with a dead-end way of life.

The corporate apologists have done everything possible to deny these problems. Their efforts have been most successful with regard to the environment and global warming where it's impossible to prove the direct environmental impact of driving a mega SUV 100 miles each way to work. To them, global warming is a conspiracy theory invented by hysterics who enjoy riding their bike to work while believing the world is coming to an end. Biblical wildfires, droughts, floods are, for denialists, "within the normal trend" - A reassuring speed bump on a thousand year graph to gaze at while your house is floating down the river. Mass extinction, nothing to see here. There is no causal link between mankind killing off wildlife at an unprecedented rate and wildlife disappearing at an unprecedented rate.

You have to be a brain dead zombie to believe this shit, which is why they like it so much. 

Where denial cuts closer to home literally, is their own homemade self-destruction by knife and fork. The efficient killing machine consisting of corporate junk food, opioids, and deathcare, now causing record fatalities and bankruptcies. All put down to "consumer choice". Not a problem, a feature. The "freedom" to self-destruct. So many ways to die, we never had it so good.

But the linchpin of the whole system, is the fraudulent economy, now running on money printing and record debt. The hunger games Powerball lottery known as the "American Dream" wherein all of the carbon profits are siphoned off to the Cayman Islands. Potemkin belief in this recurring nightmare leads to ever-increasing poverty and unhappiness, which can only be ameliorated through self-medication. It's a closed loop system: Brainwashing, consumption, addiction, debt accumulation, exploitation. Rinse and repeat. A system aided and abetted by serial asset bubbles, projecting the illusion of fake wealth just long enough to monetize another speculative frenzy. This Ponzi era has been a con man's paradise, with record low white collar prosecution. Fraud and criminality now "business as usual". 

Breaking out of this death spiral is a personal choice to no longer be useful carbon. I call it "surthrival" - living zen in a dystopian world. Choosing reality over fantasy. In the zen way of life, less is more. Do not compare yourself to others: Nowadays people go to top schools to get a piece of paper not an education. Most graduate as indoctrinated drones. Education comes from observation, questioning, curiosity, and most importantly adherence to facts over opinions. Refuse to assimilate: Compete by being different. Question assumptions: the biggest lies are always embedded in the unquestioned assumptions. Eliminate liabilities: Realize most material assets are liabilities. Rent don't own: Everyone is renting anyways. Seek inner gratification, not external gratification. Breathe well: breath is the most vital bodily function, and the least conscious. Deepening and slowing the breath rate and pausing between breaths, tells the body and mind, everything is A-OK. Whether it is or not. Navy Seals call it "box breathing". 

Be here now. Don't drink the Kool-Aid. And don't fall for any of the newfangled religions, such as the cult of the failed casino operator. He is instant gratification personified. 

Trade War 2019: Mutual Assured Destruction

I've warned here on these pages for twelve years straight that U.S. trade policy with China is an economic disaster. Of course, protesters at the WTO meeting in Seattle circa 2000 were the true harbingers of collapse. But free trade has been Republican orthodoxy for forty years straight, right up until Trump came along. Which is why his only accomplishment is to close the barn door now that the horses are out. What the wise man does at the beginning, the circus clown does at the end...

Expedient shape shifting is the new "ideology" of the right i.e. whatever it takes to stay in power and keep the corruption flowing. Make no mistake, this EPIC trade war hubris is the iceberg now sinking the GOP Titanic. To think that they are betting the party on a protectionist "liberal" policy, is biblical irony. Had Obama tried the same thing, he would have been crucified by the rabid right. More proof that today's lost "values voters" believe whatever Rupert Murdoch tells them to believe every morning.

"Ever since President Ronald Reagan, there has been an “inexorable movement” within the GOP toward free trade"

But that’s changing under Trump, and it’s scrambling traditional alliances between Republican lawmakers and America’s business community, putting both on uncertain footing"

In some ways, Trump’s approach is more in line with liberals, including potential 2020 rivals Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren"

The trade war is reaching a crescendo as China refuses to back down which is forcing Trump to escalate ahead of the election. He knows this can't drag on much longer, which is why he is going for the kill. For their part, China wants Trump to escalate and self-implode. Both sides see blood in the water, neither side will admit it's their own. It's a case study in tragic hubris.

Bear in mind, trade talks are currently underway:

Yesterday:
China Signals Reluctance to Sign a Comprehensive Trade Deal

Vice Premier Liu He, who will lead negotiations for China, told dignitaries that his offer to the U.S. will not include commitments on reforming Chinese industrial policy or government subsidies, according to to Bloomberg. These are among the Trump administration’s main demands in the trade talks.


Today, the U.S. escalated:

Which elicited this response from China:

Which elicited the U.S. to raise the nuclear option again after Peter Navarro (last week) denied having ever raised it last week:

The whole idea is to implode the Chinese currency which will implode Chinese markets.

What they are assiduously ignoring is the fact U.S. markets are now falling faster than China's:

This is how the trade deficit got "fixed" in 1930, and 2008:

1929 Deja Vu: Moral Collapse Precedes Financial Collapse

90 years ago this month, Wall Street crashed in the worst decline in market history. The market eventually stabilized and then rallied for several months into 1930. As global trade wars escalated, false optimism prevailed, as investors believed the worst was over. Then, the market rolled over and never looked back. Turns out, the worst hadn't even started yet...

Revisionist historians of the right wing persuasion believe that FDR used the 1929 crash and the ensuing mayhem to undermine capitalism. A socialist Shock Doctrine if you will. This is a prevalent belief among libertarians. Real historians - not biased by politics - know that FDR SAVED capitalism in America, because without the public interventions, the country was heading straight for revolution. The fact that the U.S. is the least socialist country in the developed world gives lie to the entire myth on its face, but to press the point home, we have now re-created the exact same events. So now we'll see where we land on the political-economic spectrum. To the left of FDR or to the right. I'm pretty sure, we all know the answer. This is an existential moment for criminality...

"Trump has seen for decades a loose culture that has enabled white-collar criminals to inflict great damage on the American people and get away with it"

This year, federal prosecutors are on track to bring the fewest number of white-collar criminal cases this year in at least 33 years...our country’s not taking white-collar crime seriously has helped to culturally normalize it and reinforce in the minds of executives the idea they can violate the spirit — if not the letter — of the law without fear of recrimination. This in turn fuels still more bad behavior while lowering the bar of what voters consider acceptable behavior."

Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the late senator from New York, once warned of the danger of “defining deviancy down,” in which worse and worse behavior comes to be accepted as the norm. This explains much about how Trump — whose company has been linked with everything from housing discrimination to outright fraud — has gotten away with so much. His standards are low; his ethics, nonexistent. And yet he is adored by millions. This says as much about him as it does about us."

Hedge fund manager Ray Dalio is making the rounds this year selling the view that this era is very similar to the late 1930s - Rising nationalism, economic populism, socialism versus capitalism. Neo-Nazis on the rise, so forth. In his view, 2008 was the equivalent of 1929. There is only one problem - he seems to have forgotten the part about the crash. I mean the real crash, not that dip that lasted a few months in 2009.

The main difference between 2008 and 1929 is that policy-makers couldn't control the crash in 1929. It got away from them. The market sank -90% in three years. Across every major risk asset class investors were wiped out. The gold standard had prevented the type of monetary mega bubble we've seen in the past decade which saved capitalism from the brink of extinction. Which is why back in the early 1930s, there were no apologists for greed running amok as there are now. Occupy Wall Street would have been a sustained movement in that era. Contrast that experience with 2008 and the post-Lehman era - tens of trillions of central bank funny money boosted U.S. stocks back to the Lehman level within 18 months, new highs within five years. Whereas it took 25 years to recapture 1929's high. No surprise, during this past decade, the gap between the bailed out wealthy and everyone else has  skyrocketed to levels last seen in...1929. Worse yet, unlike the 1930s, the past decade did nothing to resolve the debt crisis that created the 2008 meltdown in the first place. It was not a reset, it was the opposite - a massive expansion of debt levels particularly with respect to corporate and sovereign debt levels.

Here we see that in the past year, central banks have over-stimulated gamblers to proactively prevent recession. However, in doing so they've set-up an asset crash:

All of which means that this past decade has been nothing like the 1930s from an economic and political standpoint because there has been no "shared sacrifice". There has only been one monetary bailout after another. Which was by far the worst outcome from 2008 for true believers of capitalism  - no accountability and no prosecutions. And that has given rise to a culture of licentious criminality, the likes of which the U.S. has never seen before.

What the Lonely Crowd accurately predicted was a consumeristic society cleaved of traditional values, floating adrift in a sea of relative morality. Competitive conformity being the sole moral standard. Fast forward to several rounds of corporate shock doctrine later and out of sheer expediency to save the "system", white collar criminality had to be normalized. If they didn't bail out criminals in 2008, the whole system would have collapsed. One decade of bailouts later and acceptable deviancy has been defined down to the point where the Anti-Christ is now the saviour. Sanctimonious criminals are doling out religious advice to the "unfaithful". Republicans are ignoring Trump's ever-greater abuses of power because criminality is now existential to "the system".

Nevertheless, the amount of corruption people deem as acceptable will collapse along with the markets. Prechter has made this point from a social mood perspective, that when markets are booming people turn a blind eye to malfeasance, but when losses mount, social mood turns dark and so-called "values" change. It's a very cynical view of humanity, painting a picture of stark moral nihilism, but sadly this era proves he is right.


Steer clear of tall buildings with open windows. Lonely sheeple won't believe the amount of criminality they've been voting for all along. And they won't stand for it once it hits THEIR wallet. 

Roman Circus 2019: Send In The Clowns

Sadly, today's buffoon class doesn't get to write the history of this era. This is what clear-eyed historians will have to say about this farcical endgame circus...

"The Rise And Fall Of I, Clownius"

By the end, the American dream had been sold down to a hunger games Powerball lottery, running on the glue fumes of past history. The crash of 2008 and its Corporate Shock Doctrine aftermath had nearly killed off the Republican base of reliably useful carbon. America's "exceptional" exploitation model had exacted a heavy carbon tax and was at risk of yielding to socialist mediocrity - a world in which workers get paid what they are worth, and billionaire robber barons are forced to make an honest living sans recurring bailouts. The extant criminal class were beside themselves with panic. 

But as fate would have it, the Banana Republican party, guardians of criminality, had one more trick up their sleeve - fake nationalism. For that they recruited a well known con man, skilled in Reality TV and expert at recycling abject failure into fake success. He became known as the Manchurian Candidate, because he had business conflicts of interest in Russia and the Russians helped him get elected. The FBI never proved direct Trump collusion despite indicting half a dozen campaign operatives. Trump, knowing that he faced presidency or prison for the next election, threw the door wide open to any country willing to help him rig the election in exchange for quid pro quo. Democrat efforts to impeach Trump were stymied as Republicans blocked all efforts to subvert their subversion of democracy. 

The whole operation was going swimmingly until the Manchurian Candidate lost the script and started an existential trade war with America's largest supply chain vendor and source of cheap capital. The loyal Republican base had inconveniently jumped the shark from their traditional fake values and found nationalist kinship with their Russian-installed con man - doubling down on fraud and criminality. Unfortunately, Trump and his loyal Twitter mob got locked in a demented death spiral that inadvertently imploded the global economy via their out-of-control trade war.

While all of this carnival was playing out, the real looting was of course taking place in the background, with all of the ill-gotten-gains safely absconded to the Cayman Islands well ahead of the inevitable meltdown.

Trump's main achievement during this period was to deplete all of the fiscal and monetary reserves that would be needed in the next recession, in order to amplify his economic con job. Which worked fantastic - most people were thoroughly conned. Then he de-regulated conflict of interest in the financial services crime syndicate for maximum fraud and profit, essentially legalizing criminality. 

By the Fall of 2019, the looting of the Treasury had inadvertently caused a liquidity meltdown in global markets starting in overnight repo markets, cascading to momentum tech, IPOs, Biotechs, Bitcoins, pot stocks, emerging markets, oil futures - domino collapsing Trump's entire bigger, fatter "everything bubble". For their part, the Fed was typically clueless and reactive, not wanting to depart from tradition. Sticking with their same failed backward looking econometric models for fear of looking like they don't know what they're doing.

As the global economy collapsed, central banks panicked, flooding the system with record amounts of monetary heroin and charging people to save money -  which pushed investors out of cash and into the riskiest assets. All of which had the net effect of putting the populace under a drug-induced state of monetary euthanasia ahead of the final collapse. It was "easy money". 

When the crash arrived, "no one saw it coming". Both sides were too glued to their own version of what wasn't going to happen aka. "Politics". Corporate Mad Men were making the quarter by every layoff possible. Zombies were binge watching Netflix and otherwise becoming an accessory to Dumbphone. The incumbent party had done their level best to conceal the implosion of the economy as long as possible. Rightly fearing that any amount of truth would prevent re-election.

Sadly, the Republican useful carbon got wiped off the financial map by their very own trusted criminals, due to maximum exposure to fraud at the point of maximum implosion. Having served their purpose, they were unceremoniously discarded in the American tradition. 

Criminality as a political movement had reached its end in America.

No clowns were laughing when the circus ended.

What A Fool Believes

If there is a recession now, Herbert Hoover doesn't get re-elected. Which is why we are witnessing EPIC lying right now - high even by Banana Republican standards, as the echo chamber of exceptional fools works double-overtime dispensing lethal Kool-Aid to the true believers in criminality.

Be sure to get everyone.

"What a fool believes he sees

No wise man has the power to reason away

What seems to be

Is always better than nothing

Nothing at all"

We're at that point in the "cycle" where for "true believers", truth is no longer an option.

Choose one. 

Economists have a good excuse for not seeing recession coming, because they never see recession coming. They have a perfect track record in failure to maintain. They use backwards-looking data models to "predict" the future, which is why they excel at predicting the past. A strategy that works great for most of the cycle and then fails catastrophically at the very end of the cycle...

Barron's this week: 

The Fed has been complicit in EVERY recession in U.S. history, this one will be no exception. They are already .75% behind the (yield) curve:

Casino liquidity is non-existent. The exits to Trump Casino are already closed.

This prediction from July of this year was prescient:

“In our mind, this persistently low market depth leaves U.S. equities vulnerable from here if central banks fail to validate market expectations or U.S. recession risks resurface”

The S&P 500 has risen a stellar 19% this year, but the strong performance has been accompanied by light inflows and trading activity as well as low market liquidity, the analyst pointed out. The average market depth has been close to historical lows"

There are several reasons in this cycle why complacency is running much higher than normal at this point in the cycle, not the least of which is the incessant MAGA con job. Brainwashing on Twitter and elsewhere:

"...while working as an analyst, Kudlow wrote in December 2007 that there was no recession coming — just before the biggest recession the US has endured since the Great Depression struck.


“Well, I plead guilty to that late 2007 forecast“



In addition however, the chasmic U.S. deficit is now artificially propping up "GDP". The U.S. is currently borrowing 4.5% of GDP to generate 2% GDP growth. A recession at any other time in U.S. history i.e. when honesty prevailed. Inter-generational theft is now "GDP".

U.S. pundits have another bad habit of always using global collapse as a reason to ignore global economic collapse. The argument goes like this:

"As investors worry about a global economic slowdown and the threat of an ever-escalating trade war, they've been fleeing to higher-quality assets. These include long-term US government bonds."

"Wall Street experts point out that economic data in the US is looking pretty solid at the moment. They include Ed Yardeni of Yardeni Research"

"Inverted yield curves don't predict recessions...They've tended to predict financial crises, which morphed into economy-wide credit crunches and recessions."


I couldn't have said it better myself. Now put down the crack pipe son, you sound like a fucking moron 

The other source of false optimism stems from the record stock buyback binge which has inflated earnings per share by reducing share count. This has concealed the earnings recession. Today's false pundits ALWAYS reference earnings per share, never aggregate earnings.

What we see in the chart below is aggregate corporate profit as share of GDP. What we notice is that corporate profit was fairly stable up until Y2K/9/11 Shock Doctrine took hold, and then it almost doubled. And rose again after the global financial crisis. Which is of course the mirror image of what happened to labor's share of GDP, which collapsed. 

We also notice that aggregate profit growth relative to GDP peaked years ago and has been propped up subsequently by share buybacks. Absolute profit (not shown), peaked in 2012.

As we know, the Big Short protagonist, Michael Burry (and many others) have warned that the transition from active to passive management has fueled a valuation mega bubble.

Arguably this era's largest bubble.

Active managers have been far more reluctant to embrace this bubble:

And while on the subject of the Big Short, there is the unprecedented central bank driven push into risk which was also evident in 2008 at the onset of recession, which artificially narrowed risk spreads. Cue Christian Bale on the drums. 


July 2019:

"The hunt for yield is making parts of the U.S. corporate bond market look a lot like 2007"

ZH: Hugh Hendry Explains Imagined Realities From A Money Manager's Annual Bonus Perspective

"He who hangs on to (economic) truth has lost...In the long run we will come to rue the central bank actions of today. But today there is no serious stimulus programme that our Disney markets will not consider to be successful. Markets can be no more long term than politics...the modern market is effectively Keynesian with an Austrian tail."

What does that mean? It means that it all ends with a massive "unforeseen" crash. As the unprecedented gap between fantasy and reality closes limit down. 

All of which combined, is why gamblers just this week blithely ignored the worst start to a quarter since October 2008, instead buying the dip with both hands. 

Thoroughly conditioned to welcome economic risk.

Which is where this gets interesting. Because this week was the third time that economic cyclicals have crashed down to support. Each rally of shorter duration. This last rally only lasted two weeks.

Small caps, same pattern - shorter- and shorter rallies

The other major issue from a technical perspective is the speculative Nasdaq, which is stalled at last year's level. It now sports a head and shoulders top.

Which in Elliott Wave parlance portends a third wave down.

Which leaves recession stocks - Staples, Utilities, 

and Defense-, indicating an expansion of the volatility range:

Just remember,

No one was allowed to see it coming, because that could affect the quarter AND the election.