Ben Shalom Godot

Following the script of the 1953 play "Waiting for Godot," the bears continue to wait for the Fed to indicate once and for all that its open ended bond buying program will start to wind down. In the play, Godot never arrived. Worse, we are not even sure he ever existed.

Analysis of the financial markets no longer depends on the psychology of the masses. It does not depend on how corporations are developing new products or effing up the ones they already have. And it does not depend on international capital flows, unemployment and the rest of the dismal inputs that give financial news reporters something to say.

No, it all comes down to how one man thinks and can express himself. Our job as market professionals is to guess what pearls will emerge from his mouth before congress or the news media. Guess right and riches will follow. Guess wrong and you'd better practice your spatula technique.

Guess? Since when did I need an MBA and 27 years experience to guess what one man will do? They don't teach profiling at the NY Institute of Finance. They do suggest not buying only one stock and hoping. Rather, they suggest a basket to remove the risk of any one of them going belly up. 

That's what technical analysis is all about, you know. Figuring out what the masses will do based on what they have done in similar situations in the past and then assigning probabilities on the result all with the goal of making the buy, sell or hold decision. 

Yeah, it was a run-on sentence. Good writing skills don't make you money when you are guessing what the man with the most power in the world, under the deepest scrutiny, will say ahead of every other Tom, Dick and Tracy trying to guess the same thing.

It is nowt a quarter hour to the close. The Fed minutes are out and we find out that half of the board is chicken and the other half is blind. You can figure out which it which. The market sure could not as it jerked around for a solid hour. 

Now we wait for Godot to speak - again.