Regarding your thoughts on why the markets are yawning on this whole impeachment shit, it is because everyone knows the Senate will acquit. That is a guarantee. This was known when the process started months ago. The only new dig now is WHEN Pelosi and her crew send the articles to the Senate. Wonder if they will wait until November? Heh.
Fri closed on a high both in the US & EU, however, the quadruple witching rollovers won't be reflected until Monday open so Monday might see a gap up or down on opening. Fri was rather unusual, it was the last full staffed working day of the year (many players are taking a break till Thu 2nd Jan) so many fund managers were just tinkering their window dressing rather than actually trading, this can be seen in the VIX that actually rose even though the S&P hit new highs and Gold also remained flat. Also of interest is that the big 3 techs (Apple, Amazon & Google) were all down for the day. The rest of the year is what's called "peak funny season", anything can happen and none of it should be taken as an indication of the direction for 2020. Although I see markets going higher next year, I am not in the camp calling a 10% rally for early 2020, my view is that all the negatives that have accumulated in the last months of 2019 but have been ignored will be factored in early 2020, March reporting will then determine the direction for 2020. I expect high volatility in Jan and mostly a down month. Until we see the figures of March reporting, markets remain over-bought on sentiment with no substance justifying the high prices, so, watch out for any black swan in the 1st 3 months of 2020, one of these could bring markets down big.
Ironically, for the first time ever we are facing something unprecedented in Jan 2020, with all these other factors in play... Johnson's Brexit on Jan 31st. It will be an interesting 1st quarter for sure.
Monday starts the Santa rally countdown but it's also the funny season so whatever the rally is in the next 7 trading days, it is neither here nor there as an indication for 2020. The Santa rally normally is driven by fund managers doing window dressing i.e. they buy the best performers of the year so that their year-end report looks better than it actually was... the wow factor trying the fool the retail investor... "wow, look at this fund, it picked all the winners of the year".... Meanwhile, the actual stock-piking might as well have been done by a monkey throwing darts (an exercise conducted by both the BBC & NY Times pitted monkeys against top fund manages, in both studies the monkey did better).
Was reading up on the grate start-ups that were game changes... always thought of Gates as been a lucky opportunist being in the right place at the right time for IBM to come to him offering riches but actually he did some very clever things and was an exceptional CEO. Its Jobs that turned out to be the opportunist.... didn't invent anything at all, just had the ability to see the future and copy from others. The company that shines above all others in that era was XEROX, they invented the mouse, the graphic interface, the ethernet and multitasking, the problem was that their Technical arm located in California could not convince the Management, located in NY, to adopt any of their inventions... Out of frustration, they invited Jobs to tour their facility and showed him their inventions, the rest is history, Apple adopted the mouse and the graphic interface in the Macintosh, then Gates was able to add multitasking to that with their Windows OP and Larry Ellison completed the circle by adopting the ethernet... Xerox, that could have beaten all of Apple, Microsoft and Cisco by 10 years, and become the biggest of them all, got left behind, no visionary in their management, just like Kodak. Interesting story of how the tools of the internet evolved.
So you are long then? I exited my long trade of 8796.5 at about a 6 point profit. I cannot trust this run-up, because of the ASSHOLE IN CHIEF!
Nah, I hedged with US & EU longs back in Oct to put me near neutral, last week I closed off those longs (happily at sizable profits) so I'm back to being heavily short, the new strategy is to enter new buys starting at -2% from here progressively scaling up at each further -2%. Depending on how deep the Jan/March dip/correction is then some of the longs will marry-off existing shorts. The original strategy had to be killed as the expected Sep/Oct dip wasn't deep enough and the Nov/Dec movement was far stronger than anticipated i.e. I screwed-up at both ends, none the less I'm still ahead for the year and hope to recover the profits that escaped me in 2019 with the modified strategy above.