Did the Dow settle above 20k today because of the goings on in Washington? Deregulation, lower taxes, infrastructure? Very market-friendly stuff! Okay, but what about “border adjustment taxes”? What about the threat to companies that if they move labor across a border to gain productivity and market share, they’ll pay oh so dearly? What’s market friendly about that? Hmm…

Could it be that the market (millions of investors and traders collectively) is simply in bull-mode and hears only what a bull would want to hear?

I feel that old Jesse Livermore quote coming on:

Not even a world war can keep the stock market from being a bull market when conditions are bullish, or a bear market when conditions are bearish. And all a man needs to know to make money is to appraise conditions.

Or, has the market done the math and determined that the potential good outweighs the potential bad? Or perhaps the potential good has more potential of coming to pass than does the potential bad?

But, you know, you just can’t know. As we’ve explored herein a thousand times, the factors that impact the world’s markets and economies are too numerous to count, let alone assemble and base predictions on.


Dean Moriarty, may as well be writing about the collective global market as he writes on metaphysics:

… there is too much to see, and in the looking is found the part, but not the whole. It is known that the part is in the whole, and to know the whole you have to see all of the parts. But the parts are too small to be seen all at one time.