Finance 0

Trader: ‘Stocks Might Even Go Down. Stranger Things Have Happened’

By Kurt Osterberg · On July 6, 2017

On Wednesday, former FX trader Richard Breslow had a Kimble moment when, finally at wit’s end with people’s haphazard use of hyperbolic language, he banned certain words until such a time as you can pass his “plain-speaking test.”

See Richard is like Detective Kimble from Kindergarten Cop and you’re like the kindergartners. By the time Friday rolls around (or, in the case of this week, by the time Wednesday rolled around), Breslow has reached a breaking point with what he generally regards a cacophony of senseless bullshit:

But the important thing to remember is that it isn’t Richard’s lack of patience that’s the problem. You’re the problem.

So when Richard tells you he’s got a headache, it’s best if you don’t tell him it’s a tumor because “it’s not a tumor”…

On Thursday Richard has calmed down (mercifully), but he does think you should be wary of a creeping tendency to piece together discrete events on the way to formulating “conspiracy theories.” Because that doesn’t make you a studious trader – it just means you’ve “slid into paranoia.”

He does make several good points that we’ve made in the past including, but not limited to:

the hardest thing to do in the current environment is finding a way to hedge that doesn’t, to quote Citi, “cost a bundle of carrying”

things can be “mispriced” but that really doesn’t matter unless you can identify a catalyst that will make everyone else see that mispricing for what it is (and thus force it to correct)

credit has remained resilient in the face of damn near everything, including last week’s mini-tantrum and we’re going to need to see that change before we can definitively say the tide has turned

More below, and remember: “it’s not a tumor”…

Via Bloomberg