S&P 500

While many have noticed the demise of volatility in the US equity markets - 104 days without a 1% drop, plunge in VIX, record low monthly ranges - it is the most highly speculative and most over-valued companies that appear to be the biggest beneficiaries of peak animal spirits. It has never been cheaper to hedge stocks in the Nasdaq...

The great moderation of risk is nearing unprecedented lengths...

While expectations of short-term stock volatility is jumping...

After numerous warnings from Goldman strategist David Kostin that stocks are expensive, most recently over the weekend when he wrote that  "investors will soon capitulate on their expectation of upside to 2017 EPS forecasts as they face the reality that the accretive impact from tax reform will not occur until 2018" and that "revisions to consensus EPS forecasts during the past few months have been negative for both 2017 and 2018" moments ago Goldman officially downagred equities.

Conceived several years ago, "buy the (fucking) dip" was a joke among traders seeking to explain the market's nearly-instant upward mean reversion, which as we have alleged since 2009, has been pushed higher by central bank policy and various HFT strats. Since then it has, sadly, become perhaps the only "explanation" for the behavior of the most bizarre market traders have ever encountered.

Luckily, the buy the dip quote-unquote "market" may be about to end, perhaps as soon as tomorrow, if Bank of America is right.

Oil may have just stopped the Bank of Japan.

The fact is that in late September 2016, the Bank of Japan embarked on a new monetary policy of targeting a yield of 0% on 10-Year Japanese Government bonds.

What this means is that the Bank of Japan will intervene in the market to maintain a 0% yield, and this involves aggressively devaluing the Yen against the $USD. You can see this in the chart below.

The last time Robert Shiller heard stock-market investors talk like this in 2000, it didn’t end well for the bulls.

As Bloomberg reports, Shiller says when markets are as buoyant as they are now, resisting the urge to pile in is hard regardless of what else might be happening in society.

“I was tempted to do it, too,” he says. “Trump keeps talking about a new spirit for America and so you could (A) believe that or (B) you could believe that other investors believe that.”