The Most Obvious Crash In History

Looking back, today's financial pundits will be embarrassed that they missed the warning signs leading to this inevitable super crash. Unfortunately, they were too busy monetizing useful idiots. This era marks the period when the dumb money rushed off the sidelines 12 years after 2008 in order to buy a pandemic driven asset bubble at the end of the economic cycle. What finally drew them in? The gamification of markets. You can't make this shit up...

Fittingly, Robinhood finally filed for its long-awaited IPO this past week. The company grew its number of accounts 150% over the past year. Robinhood pioneered the zero commission trading model which was adopted by all of the other brokers in late 2019 just before the pandemic started. Since that time, recreational trading has skyrocketed. It's like a new pastime or hobby.

This new gambling fetish gave rise to the Dave Portnification of markets. Inexperienced buffoons who discovered markets late in life and decided they were trading geniuses. Aided and abetted by the largest central bank injections in world history. As they say, timing is everything. In Nassim Taleb's "Fooled by Randomness", he describes a rube trader who finds early success in a bull market and comes to believe he's a trading savant. So he doubles down on every trade until he blows himself up. Basically describing the Portnoy army of traders. 

All of this excessive gambling is highly reminiscent of Y2K, only today's gamblers are 100% confident that central banks won't let them down. Nevertheless, already the Fed is moving towards tapering their asset purchases which is why bond yields are falling every day now.

Sentiment Trader notes that the correlation between growth and value is now at a record low. Which is why the number of stonks holding up this gong show is also reaching record divergences in breadth. Last week I showed that the % of stocks BELOW the 50 dma at an all time high on the S&P 500 was at a multi decade high. Yesterday the same thing happened on the Nasdaq - except this is an all time high divergence: 

What we notice via sentiment is that active managers keep getting rinsed by this robo market. They have one foot out the door but then they get dragged back in which is ironically fueling the market higher.

A similar dynamic took place in 2018 and then the wheels came off the bus. It's only a matter of time. Most money managers won't see it coming. They're the reason this is taking so long.

 

On the retail side we just learned that the Ameritrade Investor Movement Index reached a new all time high in June. This indicator shows investor risk allocations in markets. We can assume via this index that record margin balances expanded again in June:

Fittingly, Amazon.com is making a new all time high this week. No stock epitomizes the insanity of this era better than Amazon. Today's full Idiocracy now has 100% confidence in the virtual economy. Because no one told them there is no such thing.

No surprise, Amazon is one of the top stocks manipulated on social media.

 

In summary, we have now achieved the full Ponzification of society. An army of Bernie Madoffs running amok figuring out their next pump and dump scheme. 

For their part, today's financial pundits realized a long time ago that there was no money to be made from intelligent discourse. The addressable audience is far too small. So they are now all competing to monetize the vast base of useful idiots.

Which is why they don't have time to focus on other matters, such as obvious risk. 

A One Way Trip To The Sun

The biggest (%) rally since 1933 powered to new all time highs this week, now unconfirmed by Dow Theory. Today's gamblers are convinced that printed money is the secret to effortless wealth. Which makes them willing accomplices to record fraud. When their Ponzi scheme explodes they will all be lining up for their own personal Goldman Sachs style Fed bailout, and they will be shocked to learn it's not forthcoming...

The trolls were very active this week on my Twitter feed. I've been tweeting more often lately in lieu of blogging, since there are only so many ways of describing out of control lunacy. In the event, I rankled a few troglodytes who complained I was spamming them. So I did them a favour and blocked them from my Twitter feed. You have to wonder who camps out on someone's site just to inform them they are wrong. Is it not enough to be an all knowing genius? And isn't there copious rivers of bullshit they should be assimilating from their like-minded Borg?

Only a total jackass who's never been through a bear market would tempt fate by assuming this gong show will last forever. Those of us who endured the Dotcom bubble and the housing bubble know what happens once you reach that point of assumed invincibility. Maximum pain. 

Nevertheless, the over-confidence of today's bulls represents the Pyrrhic victory of one way markets. Consensus markets are the inevitable result of centrally planned Ponzi schemes. This market is the perfect adjunct to Globalization - it takes in copious amounts of hard earned money and redistributes it to the ultra wealthy. It's reverse redistribution. Welfare for billionaires.

It's also the perfect recipe for a bidless market. Consensus and markets are two things that are lethal together. This is not a sports competition wherein the goal is to convince as many people as possible over to your "side" - yay our team won. Unless you're one of today's ubiquitous con men whose job is to suck as many people into these markets as possible. From real estate to financial investments, monetizing useful idiots is the new standard "business model".

Now that Reddit pump and dump schemes have been officially sanctioned by Congress, short sellers have been wiped off the map. I showed this chart on Twitter which indicates that the COVID-decimated retail stocks are not only leading this entire rally, but they are exhibiting a rising wedge that is inversely identical to the VIX falling wedge. Hedging is now impossible. This market is now totally out of control. When the selling begins the algos will step aside and there will be no one on the other side of the trade. 

Many of today's critics of Disney markets believe that central banks deserve all of the blame. They seem to forget that even the Fed recently warned that speculation is out of control and now poses a systemic risk to financial markets. 

May 6th, 2021:

"Rising asset prices in the stock market and elsewhere are posing increasing threats to the financial system, the Federal Reserve warned in a report Thursday"

When the entire financial system collapsed in 2008, the public expected the Fed to bailout "the system" at any cost. That has entailed non-stop monetary bailouts for the past decade. In the spirit of Japanification, the illusion of prosperity must be maintained at all cost. Even if it means that an entire society now has the investing acumen of Bernie Madoff. And yet for some reason, pundits who assiduously believe in personal freedom, don't believe in personal responsibility. They also don't question today's ubiquitous mass media subscription model which is capitalism's answer to Pravda. Apparently, the unvarnished truth plays no role in valid decision making. Sugar coated bullshit is all we need. It's the same thing with these anti-vaxxers - they trust McDonald's more than they trust NIH. 

100% Idiocracy.

To solely blame the Fed is to assume that a handful of shall we say oblivious technocrats are the entire scope of today's problem. When in fact the real problem is societal moral collapse on a biblical scale. The magnitude of a bubble is in direct proportion to the number of morons who believe in it. And by that standard this is the biggest bubble in human history. How many pump and dumps have we witnessed just in the past year - Ark funds, Biotechs, Chinese stocks, Cryptos, Gamestop, electric vehicles, SPACs, IPOs. More in one year than we've seen in the past decade. And yet still the masses are unfazed - willing accomplices to record fraud.

Let's take a look at the big "winners" from the first half with focus on the well known names:

Reddit-sponsored AMC cinemas is the leading % gainer. From a low of $2 at the start of the year, to a high of ~$60. The blue arrow shows where it was at the beginning of the pandemic. 

Vaccine biotech Moderna now has a market cap of $90 billion and a price/sales ratio of 35:

Another big winner is Applied Materials which was flat in 2020 and has skyrocketed 200% since November:

But the stock that has been really powering the Nasdaq lately is Nvidia, which is up 170% since the start of the pandemic.

When Genius Failed To Exist

Today's financial pundits are mental midgets standing on the shoulders of intellectual giants. Therefore they are oblivious to the fact that this gamified alchemy is the exact opposite of what created prosperity in the past...

The stock market just closed out its (Second) best first half since 1998 which directly preceded the LTCM (Long Term Capital Management) debacle. We also learned back in April that more money poured into stocks since the election than in the prior 12 years combined. Since that time, inflows have continued their record pace - ETF inflows are almost at a new record only six months into the year. What we are witnessing is the ideal recipe for panic meltdown. 

Going back to 1998, Long Term Capital Management (LTCM) was a massively leveraged hedge fund managed by financial PhDs who were considered geniuses on Wall Street and in academia. The collapse of their fund in the second half of 1998 almost brought down the global financial system. They had made various asinine assumptions about the correlation of risk assets that were true most of the time but categorically failed when markets went into meltdown mode following the 1997 Asian Financial crisis. In other words they were oblivious data miners who assumed the past could be endlessly extrapolated into the future, hence they blindly ignored all imminent signs of risk and focused solely upon statistical probabilities. Which is the way all of today's quantitative/algorithmic trading programs work. Ignorance is bliss. More on that later. The book that described the entire debacle was called "When Genius Failed". Hence, the title of this post. The net result of that collapse was a massive Fed bailout that inadvertently lubricated the melt-up phase of the brewing Dotcom bubble. 

The Dotcom bubble itself was abided by the asinine belief that valuations, profits, and even sales no longer matter. All that matters is internet page views aka. "eyeballs". That new "business model" consisting of massively unprofitable companies going public at a record rate soon found the natural limit of fools with money to burn on worthless IPOs. At that point, the "smart money" rotated to the Big Cap safe havens - Microsoft, Intel, Dell, and Cisco. And then those stocks imploded bringing down the entire casino.

A divergence very similar to what is happening today:

When the Fed sponsored DotCom bubble collapsed, they lowered rates to a multi-decade low 1.5% which set off the melt-up stage of the brewing housing bubble. At the time, Fed Chairman Greenspan lauded the "financial innovations" taking place in the subprime lending market and he encouraged borrowers to load up on adjustable rate mortgages (ARMs). ARMs had been previously unpopular in the U.S. market because they shift all interest rate risk from the lender to the borrower, offset by a minor interest rate reduction. Within months, Greenspan jacked up rates 17 meetings in a row and imploded everyone who took his advice. But not before Wall Street had figured out how to package subprime dog shit into self-destructing weapons of mass destruction that inadvertently imploded the global financial system. 

And here we are again in the midst of a monetary fueled housing bubble:

So, what to do? The Fed bailed out Wall Street on the systemic meltdown they had created. AND paid them in full on their bets that the whole shit show would collapse.  Then the Fed lowered interest rates to 0% and started pumping money directly into financial markets. Thus inventing socialism for the rich.

Fast forward to today and the Idiocratic beliefs that attend this post-pandemic bubble are first and foremost the ubiquitous faith that assets are worth whatever price the last fool paid for them. In addition, the belief that central banks are omnipotent. The other obligatory delusion is the studied ignorance of accumulated market fragility which is a net result of 13 years of continuous monetary bailouts.

At this lethal juncture, low volatility is conflated with low risk. Which has been proven to be an asinine assumption over and over again these past years and decades. Nevertheless, serial bailouts have kept this critical hypothesis alive. 

Introduction To Volatility Targeting

"Volatility is the most common risk metric of a stock. The main aim of the volatility targeting technique is to manage the portfolio’s exposure in such a way that the volatility of a portfolio is as close to the target value as possible. In other words, to ensure that the amount of dollar risk remains the same. To do this, the portfolio manager has to increase or decrease the amount of leverage, depending on the volatility"

Here we see that S&P 500 volatility is at a three year low:

Here we see that these algo controlled "volatility targeted" markets are making new all time highs this week amid the lowest number of stocks confirming this rally in 18 years. I calculate the number of stocks BELOW the 50 day moving average at every S&P all time high: 

Below we now see that this past month June 2021 officially has all top ten highest option skew values in recorded history going back 30 years. Which from a statistical point of view is a Black Swan outlier event. In a random distribution, the probability that a top ten skew value will appear in a given month over 30 years is 1 in 36 (2.7%). The chance that all ten would be in the same month is .027 to the tenth power: (0.00000000000000027). In other words, "someone" is making massive bets that this gong show is ending.

As a reminder, skew represents deep out of the money option bets on a "Black Swan" market event:

"The SKEW index is a measure of potential risk in financial markets.

SKEW values generally range from 100 to 150 where the higher the rating, the higher the perceived tail risk and chance of a black swan event"

As we see the highest values happen to be the last four trading days of the best half since 1998:

Amid all of this asinine risk, it's ironic that FINRA finally got around to fining Robinhood for causing "widespread and significant harm to customers" during the Gamestop debacle. Which incited the suicide of one young trader who woke up to an erroneous -$720,000 account balance.

However, in the meantime since that debacle in late January, the Robinhood platform has added record numbers of new users, Congress has officially sanctioned Reddit pump and dump schemes, and margin debt has reached new all time highs. In other words, this fine is totally meaningless with respect to addressing the increasing fragility of market structure. A fragility that is hidden behind the collapsed volumes and volatility that have been extremely profitable for options market makers.

Suffice to say that the number of young people who are now at risk of waking up to negative account balances is quite unthinkable. All aided and abetted by a profoundly corrupt financial services cartel that has now captured regulators and effectively neutered them. 

Which ensures that they are always barking up the wrong tree. Penalizing the pissant Robinhood platform while the real risk is officially sanctioned.

"This week alone, 18 companies are seeking to go public, including Chinese ride-hailing company Didi Global in what will be the biggest IPO of the year...That’s the most companies in a single week since 2004"

 June was also the busiest single month since August 2000"

The majority of the returns are going to the (pre-IPO) institutional buyers.” 

FOMO [Fear of Missing Out] is the biggest thing"

(FYI, my IPO data includes SPAC IPOs)

https://stockanalysis.com/ipos/statistics/

MISSION ACCOMPLISHED

To read today's Idiocratic news, one would believe that everything is back on track in the economy. Unfortunately, nothing could be further from the inconvenient truth. However, we CAN assume that the Wall Street recovery is complete...

"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way—in short, the period was so far like the present period"

It's a testament to the attention deficit of this gambling addicted society that they conflate manipulated stock market prices with the underlying economy. For the past 13 years since the 2008 bailout, stocks have rallied at every sign of a weakening economy, because it meant more central bank socialism for the rich. Which also explains from an archaeological standpoint why a global pandemic at the end of the longest cycle in U.S. history was viewed as a reason to go ALL IN. 

No surprise, Biden's economic plans have been roundly derided by the right as socialism for the middle class. Zerohedge and their patented inflation hysteria have been at the forefront of  this disinformation campaign regarding the economy. When they run short of their own in-house fiction they quote Wall Street's liars to bolster their credibility. Now, at this most parlous juncture they are declaring victory for the GOP states that ended the Federal pandemic unemployment benefits early. They cite a sharp dropoff in unemployment claims as proof that cutting people off from unemployment programs worked. I suggest that declining unemployment claims are a direct result of the programs ending, not proof that the GOP economy is "fixed".

The long-term problem with the U.S. economy derives not from emergency unemployment programs, but instead from the habitual mass layoffs that have attended every downturn of the past several decades. Each time mass layoffs occur, there is far less labor participation in the economy, as people retire early or are forced to take part time jobs. Good jobs are traded for junk jobs. This fact is captured in the Job Quality Index which has been falling for 30 years straight. 

Another way of looking at the problem is via the long term unemployment ratio below:

The % of unemployed over 27 weeks has sky-rocketed back to global financial crisis levels. Which is an indicator of how many people are on the verge of "retiring" early. When they "retire" they will be conveniently removed from the official unemployment rate. Problem solved.

As we see above, what happened during the pandemic is that once again U.S. companies panicked and laid off large swaths of their workforce. Arguably, the ranks of low wage unskilled workers are the easy problem to "fix" as Zerohedge gleefully points out. But, the harder problem to fix will be in the highly paid skilled workforce which is now facing an acute labor shortage that unfortunately won't be fixed by McDonald's help wanted signs. 

What do Boeing and GE have in common? Weak balance sheets due to massive stock buybacks. So what did they do in the pandemic? They laid off tens of thousands of workers. 

"Aerospace companies relied heavily on layoffs to cut costs and save cash. U.S. aerospace and defense companies have announced more than 115,000 job cuts since the World Health Organization declared the Covid-19 outbreak a pandemic last March"

it’s hard to imagine that many skilled workers would give preference to the aerospace manufacturers that laid them off when the going got tough"

Indeed. Loyalty cuts both ways. 

Today's inflation pundits are praying for stagflation, both to prove Biden wrong AND to keep a bid under their collapsing reflation trades. In today's terms they are "right" only in their proven ability to attract legions of useful idiots.

A skill I have yet to obtain.

Sadly, all of this delusion is running on glue fumes. Which means that the REAL test for this skydive into economic pavement is pending global margin call.

At that time I predict a sea change in attitude towards bailing out the rich is on tap. Today's amnesiacs must be reminded of the fact that 13 years of monetary socialism for the rich has only "saved" capitalism by making the divergence between wealthy and poor far greater in the meantime. 

I believe that such an unforeseen event will be sufficiently cataclysmic to ensure that apologists for epic greed and criminality are silenced.

For good.

No Refunds On Delusion

In a nutshell, this society is a very useful Idiocracy...

First I will sum up the events of the past two weeks:

Going into last week's FOMC meeting, inflation hysteria was reaching a zenith. The WSJ warned that the Fed was leaning hawkish into the meeting, yet somehow the Fed's shifting forward the schedule on tightening STILL shocked markets. The very same pundits who had been screaming the Fed was behind the curve somehow didn't see the Fed changing course, even though it was their hysteria that forced the Fed to pivot their stance on rate hikes. There were many reasons why today's pundits were biased towards the inflation hypothesis. CEOs were using inflation as an excuse to raise prices. Billionaires were using it as an excuse to deride wage hikes. Ponzi schemers were using inflation as a reason to bid up over-priced homes, cyclical stocks, and Bitcoins. As always, there was plenty of conflict of interest to go around. 

Since that Fed pivot, there appears to be a lot of confusion over what just happened. Some pundits are of the mind that a Fed tightening will be good for cyclicals, however, that is not the case. Their argument is that higher interest rates are good for financials and other "short duration" trades. However, what the Fed-speak did was to flatten the yield curve meaning short term rates rose and long term rates fell. Future growth rates declined at the prospect of a tighter Fed. None of which is good for cyclicals. Which is why over the past week Wall Street has been rotating back to "long duration" trades - what I call deflation trades. This means long T-bonds and long Tech stocks.

It turns out that the cure for high prices is high prices. Inflation scaremongers should remember that fact, but they won't. So we will see this movie again no doubt.

These are not bright people. But they are useful idiots.

Here we see what "inflation" looks like on an absolute basis instead of the year-over-year pandemic comparison that has generated so much hysteria:

 

This is all very much deja vu of 2018 when the Trump tax cut came into effect and the global reflation trade imploded. Today in addition, we got news that Biden reached an agreement with the Senate on an infrastructure bill - one more thing that is fully priced into "momentum value" stocks. 

The entire rest of the world ex-U.S. is effectively part of the reflation trade. From Emerging Markets to the commodity heavyweights (Australia/Canada). While European value stocks are the best performing market year to date. 

 

All of which is why the Dow has yet to confirm the new all time high on the S&P and Nasdaq. Not only is the Dow heavy on cyclicals, but it's price weighted so it's not as overly influenced by the mega cap Tech stocks. Apple, which is the largest market cap stock in the world, is only weighted 20th in the Dow 30 index.

Here we see that breadth and new highs on the S&P 500 have collapsed. Only a very few massively overvalued and overbought mega cap Tech stonks are holding up the index.

Even within the Nasdaq breadth is abysmal

What's so good about conning people into believing something that isn't true?

It's extremely lucrative for those who are looking to sell things to unsuspecting sheeple. 

In summary, overnight risk has increased exponentially over this past week.

Too Big To Bail

Global central banks have finally succeeded in creating a bubble of a sufficient magnitude that it can't possibly be bailed out. What more reason to go ALL IN?

The uneven effects of Globalization were accelerated by COVID. The super asset bubble inflated billionaire wealth to all time highs, while it collapsed the incomes of the working class. Policy-makers sensed the system was at risk and rushed in with unemployment stimulus. Nevertheless, the inequality time bomb has been ticking away silently in the background. Picture what happens in a meltdown scenario - the public will be in no mood for private bailouts amid record wealth inequality. In other words, this epic mega bubble has no safety net. Monetary or otherwise. 

Whoever was making massive options bets last week around the FOMC meeting has continued their bets this week. Option skew measures "Black Swan" market risk as imputed from deep out of the money options. 

Of course, most of today's pundits would say this is a meaningless signal with questionable accuracy. They are ignoring the fact that it worked well albeit not immediately in 2018 and again in 2020, -20% and -35% S&P declines respectively. However, these recent skew readings have been literally off the charts. The top of the skew range is supposed to be 150, whereas these current readings have been between 150 and 160. The past four weeks now has nine of the ten largest skew readings in the past 30 years. So what if instead of being a meaningless signal, these readings were telling us that the big money believes this is the end of the super cycle. What if these readings were predicting an epic collapse of biblical proportions?

We know one thing for certain, they would be assiduously ignored. The other thing we know is that ALL of today's pundits now ignoring this signal will claim that no one saw it coming. 

Top ten skew values since 1990 (data begin):

Aside from elevated skew, there is not even the slightest sign of fear in these markets. The Ponzi class has no clue what's coming. As we see via this chart of NYSE selling pressure, this pattern of complacency has been building over the past decade. Last year's pandemic selloff elicited less panic selling than 2015 and 2011, to say nothing of 2008:

Since the "bombshell" FOMC meeting last week, the Tech sector has been leading what remains of this "rally". Today, the Nasdaq made a new all time high, finally breaking above the February/April double top.

Here we see that breadth and new highs are diverging massively at this new all time high:

Looking at the Global Nasdaq we see two melt-up highs since 2010. The 2015 rally is at the mid-point of the cycle.

That 2015 rally and crash was the "Shanghai Surprise" when PBOC liquidity bid up Chinese Tech stocks to ludicrous valuations. Then they crashed -60%. This latest melt-up is the U.S. analog to that discontinuous price "discovery".

This is the new imagined reality:

Cyclicals on the other hand are looking very Lehman-esque these days.

One example is PNC Financial which made an overthrow high in 2008 as well. It turned out to be a bull trap, since the Fed was preoccupied with fighting rising inflation expectations deja vu of today. 

It turns out that those propagating inflation theories back in 2008 were wholesale idiots, just as they are now. But unfortunately, this society doesn't trust anyone who can be trusted. 

Raymond James Financial, same idea.

People had far too much confidence in the Fed and therefore they didn't manage risk. They sailed straight into disaster. No deviation from the set course.  

Of course most gamblers in 2008 didn't get bailed out, they got margined out. Only the people who actually created the entire financial disaster got bailed out.

And now everyone is betting it will happen again.

Because they believe in the "system".

And I am saying, that's a bad bet this time.

This time around someone with deep pockets agrees with me. If 2008 is any guide, it's Wall Street themselves buying this protection. Just as they did in late 2008 flipping from the Big Long, to the Big Short, using credit default swaps, just in time for subprime meltdown.  

Betting their own muppet clients are about to get wiped out by fraud and criminality.

Is this a great fucking system, or what?

There Is No Safe Space From Reality

One thing both the far left and far right have in common is an extreme aversion to reality. Since 2008 central banks have sponsored this vacation from reality by consistently bailing people out of their own stupidity, which has encouraged ever greater stupidity. Now this Idiocracy is painted into a corner with no way out. It was inevitable they would come to believe that markets drive the economy, instead of the other way around. Yet, no one wants to question this paradigm of moronism, because they don't want to look stupid. They believe in the strength of numbers...

The reason why this society doesn't see this ending is because they are now fully addicted to cheap money. This latest global housing bubble is exhibit A of a gambling addiction that has far more fear of missing out than of bubbles crashing. This week, global risk markets had a taper tantrum over the prospect of higher Fed interest rates TWO YEARs from now. What a joke. At any other time in history, these interest rates would be considered a disaster from an economic and financial standpoint. Dire emergency measures indicative of ZERO future economic growth. Today these record low rates are considered an opportunity to ignore valuations and bid asset values to infinity. The value of a perpetuity over 0% is theoretically infinite according to Finance 101. Unfortunately, in the real world there is no such thing as a perpetuity. When the cycle ends, the cash flow on insolvent assets turns negative. The value of an insolvent asset at the end of the cycle is ZERO. Today, as the global economy struggles to re-open amid massive amounts of new debt, gamblers are bidding up their own assets like it's 1929. There is now an entire generation of gamblers who believe that bear markets are a relic of the past. Defeated by free money and infinite leverage.

This week the Fed monkey hammered the reflation trade by merely suggesting that a rate hike could happen in 2023, almost two years from now. Never before has there been such a long runway given for a planned rate hike and yet it still caused a major market selloff. The question on the table is, did it kick off the final meltdown? Gamblers are now caught between the Scylla and Charybdis of a moribund economy and risk assets bid to record valuations in anticipation of strong economic growth. There are two paths this can take - imminent economic collapse to justify low interest rates, OR sustained growth justifying higher interest rates. These monetary addicts want low interest rates and high growth and now they're having a temper tantrum because both does not exist in the real world.

I leave to CNBC, Wall Street, economists, inflation assholes, and politicians to lay out the case for owning massively overvalued risk assets. Basically all of the people who benefit from the monetization of useful idiots. 

Fortunately, I don't have this conflict of interest, so here below is what could go wrong:

First off, now a small handful of massively overbought and overowned Tech stonks must carry this entire market. The Nasdaq has made three attempts at a breakout since February, each time amid weakening breadth.

Here we see via the (inverse) dollar, the $USD is carving out a similar pattern as last year. Basically a headfake selloff followed by a face ripping rally.

On Friday, the global Dow closed below the 50 day moving average for the first time since the election:

The stock / bond ratio is rolling over hard from record overbought:

As bond yields roll over, cyclicals are going bidless due to the FOMC meeting commentary and also due to late week hawkish comments from St. Louis Fed President James Bullard.

FYI, Bullard is giving another speech on Monday.

An astute observer will notice that last June when cyclicals rolled over, the 50 dma and 200 dma were at the same level. This time, the 200 dma is a bear market away and cyclicals have been above the 200 day for an entire year: