The death-spiral of shrinking volatility grows more impressive, and more ominous, each day.  Has the endgame already been imagined, perhaps, by the 1981 movie Rollover ?  The film closes with an eerie shot of a Wall Street trading room after economic Armageddon has silenced the markets. Hundreds of monitors continue to beep and blink – at each other, since, presumably, there is no longer anyone on Earth with the wherewithal to put up a bid or an offer.  

There was a time when I naïvely imagined that nimble traders would be able to thrive in a market so completely lacking in conviction as this one. If so, they are far nimbler than I. Cannier and bolder too, since there is usually no more than one good opportunity per session – and that, early in the day. We missed the express bus ourselves yesterday, when the E-mini S&P rallied from a bottom 1.00 point lower than I’d advertised. So much for the two-tick stop-loss you were advised to use. Might some of you have had the good sense to widen it just a tad?

But boring as the days have been, we dare not allow ourselves to be lulled. Practically everyone I exchange e-mails with thinks the stock market is about to sleepwalk over a cliff. The true contrarian would say that, just this once, “everyone” will be right. If so, let’s resolve to be unimpressed, since “everyone” has been bad-mouthing the market for months, if not years. Timing is everything, as they say. But don’t expect a warning blast just before stocks finally begin to give way. It will be over, I fear, before you and I have rolled out of bed. If you’ve been short for so long that you've become numb to the pain of being wrong...wrong...WRONG!, don’t give up now. As for the rest of us, time appears to be running out.