No sooner had we resigned ourselves to the vertigo-inducing logic of a 'Santa Rally' than the stock market surprises by swan-diving from a three-meter height. Talking heads attributed the weakness, as well as the upward skew of bullion and gold quotes yesterday, to Benazir Bhutto's assassination, but since when have the markets cared about what was going on in the real world, especially when the news concerned mere homicidal mayhem in a country so distant as Pakistan? We'd be surprised if one fund manager in a hundred could even locate Pakistan on a map, so we seriously doubt that they were much shaken by the murder of Bhutto yesterday by a suicide bomber. Pakistan's bourse was said to be rattled, but who knew that it was one of the hottest stock market's in the region to begin with? Concerning the U.S. stock market, we've speculated here before that even the sight of a nuclear mushroom cloud over L.A. or New York would not likely unsettle shares for more than a day or two. Why should it, when stocks have barely flinched at the prospect of a full-blown real estate deflation -- or almost as bad, a Hillary Clinton presidency? And it's not just the events of the real world that equities have contrived to ignore; they have also flouted time-tested technical and cyclical indicators that have only very rarely been wrong. One such indicator held that in years ending in 7, stocks have shown an overwhelming tendency to plummet in the four-week period between early October and early November. The declines have averaged about 15%, and until this October the indicator had worked more than 90 percent of the time. Not this time, though. Bull That Wouldn't Die The Bull Market That Wouldn't Die (TBMTWD) has reproached an even more
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