Judging by all the bearish commentary unleashed in recent weeks, one would think that the S&P has lost half of its gains since the artificial central-bank driven levitation was unleashed in 2009. Instead it is just over 10% below its all time highs. Still, for many the lack of the low-volume, low-vol levitation they have grown to love so much over the past 7 years, is making them nervous.

Current sales and buyer traffic tumbled in February for homebuilders who downgraded their confidence index to 58 (from 61) missing expctations and at its worst level since May 2015. While futures sales hope rose very modestly, NAHB shows buyer traffic plunged to its lowest since March 2015 with every region seeing weakness (most notably The West).

All this is odd given the surge in new and existing home sales...

Once again - hope appears not to be a strategy after all.

Nearly two years after Victoria Nuland decided that "Yats" should be her puppet prime minister in Ukraine as part of the CIA-organized presidential coup, the latest embarrassment for the U.S. State Department is about to become a fact when moments ago Ukrainian billionaire president Petro Poroshenko called on Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk to resign and urged the formation of a technocratic government to end a political crisis and reignite an overhaul of the economy.

Submitted by Charles Hugh-Smith of OfTwoMinds blog,

If we collectively choose wishful thinking, catastrophic consequences are guaranteed.

Wishful thinking has been an integral driver of the "recovery" 2009-2015: asset bubbles aren't bubbles, central bank policies are brilliantly successful, unemployment has dropped to levels of full employment, and so on.

The problems with wishful thinking that I describe in my book A Radically Beneficial World are becoming more apparent by the day:

Something strange is going on. Heading into the Friday open, in his daily letter to "clients", Dennis Gartman said that in his "retirement portfolio" he was short the market and long gold, to wit: