Be Careful here…

Soft payroll numbers only push Bears to cover, they are not bullish. The trends did turn up yesterday, but wait a bit before becoming an aggressive buyer for the next wave.

But here are my macro thoughts at the moment…

So much has changed..

In 1970, some fifty years ago when I started in this business of trading, every day going to an office in the iconic Board of Trade building at the foot of LaSalle Street in Chicago. This after travelling 45 miles on a train with a bunch of men wearing mostly dark suits, the ones we didn’t know we assumed were bankers. Then when trading ended around 1:30 PM we would all go down to the “Sign of the Trader” for some martini’s and hear the latest gossip and strange ideas of where the market was headed. The bankers would walk across the street because the traders had the most exciting bar in Chicago.

Now, the CBOT and CME trading floors are just a memory, you can view pictures of what was.  People trading are mostly at home, trading in pajamas, until the market closes, then they either go to Starbucks for the latest version of coffee or go to their patio where they can drink the latest canned vodka drink they bought at Wholefoods. Ideas and news are seen or heard on Twitter or CNBC, everyone sees or hears the same thing, most of it wrong, but more people know it than before.

When the big economic cycle ended in 2008 after some exciting inflation, bubbles and crashes occurred, we experienced Ben Bernanke’s infamous 2011 QE2 program. The 12 year period following has been a time of artificial markets with at times absurd zero interest rates. As this period ends, we see a lot of so called smart economists in there 50’s and 60’s, educated in the 1980-1990 time frame try to tell us what is going to happen next. They however have a big problem, Bernanke so jaded their real live experience that they have no clue what will happen next in the real market. The current FED is made up of that group.