This could turn out to be quite the week, what with Gold fixing to catapult past $800, crude oil within easy striking distance of $100/barrel, and the Fed cooking up a speedball (aka, a “Belushi”) to resuscitate credit addicts for a new round of binge buying.  There was a time when Wall Street might have show signs of nervousness ahead of such tidings. But that would imply wild rallies and swoons intraday. In fact, what we got yesterday was a mild hot-air-balloon effect, wafting rather wilding. The DJIA was up 64 points, extending a rally begun a week earlier but without eating through any significant layers of supply. That was left for today or tomorrow, when bears presumably will be more vulnerable to a short-squeeze panic caused by the Fed. 

(Click on photo to enlarge)

Why anyone should panic is beyond easy logic.  After all, the Street has already priced in a 70 percent chance of a quarter-point easing. But on Wall Street, panic is fed not by the news per se, but by the fear that the usual idiots are going to overreact to the news. Can you imagine “nothing” happening when word of a 25-basis-point easing crosses the tickertape?  Of course not. And neither can anyone in the trading pits.  In such circumstances, surviving to fight another day means making sure that you do “something” before the next guy does. Since it’s nearly impossible to imagine a sell-off on news of a rate cut, a buy-up seems all but ordained.

But how about if there’s a 50-basis-point cut?  The Street was laying 5-to-1 against this a few days ago, but that could change at post time.  Even so, there’s still room for surprise. Suppose the stock market were to get pummeled this morning, turning shorts docile and therefore spoiling a well-anticipated running start at Dow 14000? That’s about the only real surprise we could foresee, since “no one” expects a selloff ahead of the same news that pushed stocks up yesterday.  But once the news is out, stocks will probably be more vulnerable than they’ve been in months, since oil and gold are already trading at headline levels. If investors see more positives in a token rate cut than negatives in a further $10 jump in the price of fuel, they are crazier than we might have imagined.

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SEMINAR SOLD OUT,  BUT…

Seats for the November 3-4 seminar online are sold out, but if you are interested in attending the class at a later date, click here and I’ll let you know when the next session is scheduled, probably in December or January.  If you would prefer to attend an on-site class, possible venues in 2008 include Vancouver, Boca Raton and San Francisco.  Please let me know if you’d be likely to come to the seminar if it were held in one of those cities