AN ALTERNATIVE THEORY

Let me start out by saying that the pandemic has been useful to me in one regard: it has allowed me to ruthlessly prune my newsletter count. If I listened to you because you knew about markets? And as soon as things shifted in the markets you started talking about masks or remote work or (god help you) politics? Then you were doing nothing but grifting off your 20/20 hindsight. Behind me satan you can't guess at what will be you can only riff on variations of what was.

Let me also add that everyone who realized they didn't know what they were talking about and started talking about something else has been pretty big on opining on what's going on now, but without any predictions other than

1) what goes up must come down

2) bubbles are bad

3) debt is inescapable

4) crypto is the domain of pedophiles and rapists the only true hedge is gold but only if you don't believe in it too much.

Reversion to the mean is one of the safest things to profess a belief in and "bubbles are bad" is just another way of saying "I didn't get in soon enough." (3) and (4) meanwhile are just the b-school grad's way of saying "I passed my tests" because not a one of them truly understands monetary theory because they weren't required to and if they had any fucking imagination whatsofuckingever they wouldn't have gone into economics.

But ain't nobody gets asked back to CNBC by saying "I dunno what's fuckin' going on. Do you? How do you? What mileposts are you using? Based on what? How would you justify that?" So you drag out a Jeremy Grantham quote and layer it on top of a Seth Klarman quote and put forth whatever narrative fits the seat of your pants because at the end of the day

What you're seeing

Is that we've completely overrun the model

And no one has a fucking clue anymore

But nobody bought an FT subscription to hear that shit.

Take any of these guys and show them a graph of GOOG.L or AMZN and ask them where the bubble is. They'll say "now." Then show them the exact same graph stopping at 2015 and take away the dates and ask them where the bubble is. They'll still say "now." Then ask them "hey is the market in an extraordinarily dumb place because it's 85% robots HFTing ETF baskets in dark pools or is the market in an extraordinarily dumb place because people who understand options trades are frontrunning people who think they understand options trades?" and they'll sputter a bit and talk about money printers and blame it all on Modern Monetary Theory.

'cuz they don't fuckin' know. They've made their livings predicting the moves within a narrow confine ruled by an empirical rule set that, as it turns out, was bullshit all along and all it took was a global pandemic to let the monster loose to walk the earth.

I don't know what the fuck is going on. But I also have no patience anymore for people who pretend they know what the fuck is going on. It's far better to be wrong together than right alone and everyone knows that everyone knows we're in a bubble that will come crashing down any day now because why? Exactly?