Wall Street seems positively excited about the prospect of appeasing Assad and letting the whole mess simmer until the next time. If so, the world will not have breathed such an ostentatious sigh of relief since Hitler and Stalin shook hands in 1939. More likely is that, after Assad and ‘the rebels’ have half-finished their fight to the death, we’ll be dealing with Hezbollah and al Qaeda, and whatever hellacious weapons of war they eventually will come to possess.

For our part, we’ve shorted the market nonetheless, buying Diamond out-of-the-money puts yesterday for small change. This was low-hanging fruit for lazy traders, since it entailed a straight limit bid for the options, nothing fancy. Subscribers who went for this easy play should consider hitting the intermediate slopes, spreading off our ‘suicide’ bets against the trend with some of the bull plays I’ve proffered recently. They included a call spread in AMZN (October 330-335) that subscribers reported filling as low as 0.26, and a ‘camo’ trade in the E-Mini S&P that would be worth $1250 to anyone who followed the visual instruction contained in the chart tied to Monday’s tout.  For an idea of how high this mania could take the broad averages no matter what you and I think, check out my tout for the Dow Industrials.