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February 14, 2018 -- mark your calendar

So over the weekend i was doing a bit of surfing the interweb to find on Zero Hedge, the Trump supporter financial news service, the date on which the end of the upsurge in the financial market will end...You got it, Valentine's day of 2018 -- unfortunately, ZH failed to share why that particular day was going to be the day of reckoning -- but in their world a massive correction would start on that day.

You got to wonder how they can predict the "end of the world" so very accurately!  I for one am amazed by their ability -- turns out its not really ZH but some hedge fund (i've never heard of) that predicts that day, as the beginning of the end.

Personally, I suspect that some trader at "unknown" hedge fund has some shorts that are about to expire on or around March 1, 2018, and is looking to boost the value of these out of the money positions -- but lets just say that some trader has some rather large put options that expire in 6 months -- and these are way out of the money (note to credit guys at hedge fund -- make sure your boys are marking their positions to market -- and not faking it with some Theta sensitive call options).

Anyway, ZH talks about a 40% correction to the S&P500.  Now we get to the meat of the conversation, because if you exclude the AAFAM (Alphabet , Apple, Facebook, Amazon and Microsoft) the market has been rather flat over the past 18 months (yep) 35% of the uptick for the S&P500 has been these 5 stocks.

So prepare for the end of the world, soonish because some guy's got some position he's trying to unload.

On other fronts I note that oil prices are still around $43/bbl which is the lower end of the price band. If Trump starts a war with Iran (not impossible -- since the crazies are talking about "regime change in Teheran") prices would spike as something like 30% of the world crude travels trough the strait of Hormuz.

I also note that two more Italian banks were shut down over the weekend -- total "cost" is US$ 5 billion US$ 20 billion to bail them out (you can bet that it will be far more than that).

No news about Greece, but Theresa May has made its deal with the Far right of Northern Ireland to gain a majority in parliament -- Theresa has made a deal with the devil there.




Good times


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