S&P

When we first warned 8 days ago that in the last week of trading a "Red Flag For Markets Has Emerged: Pension Funds To Sell "Near Record Amount Of Stocks In The Next Few Days", and may have to "rebalance", i.e. sell as much as $58 billion of equity to debt ahead of year end, many scoffed wondering who would be stupid enough to leave such a material capital reallocation for the last possible moment in a market that is already dangerously thin as is, and in which such a size order would be sure to move markets lower, and not just one day.

The core thread of next year's relatively downbeat "surprises" from Seabreeze Partners' Doug Kass is that the crowd is wearing Trump-colored glasses and that the single-biggest surprise is how quickly the bloom comes off the Trump flower.

In 2017 Donald Trump no longer will be seen as an invincible politician or a self-proclaimed stock market savior (see Surprise #3). Rather, he will learn, the hard way, the difficulty in governing and what Mario Cuomo meant when he said, "Campaign in poetry, govern in prose."

Dow 20k is "inevitable", it's a "no brainer" according to the business news punditry...

pic.twitter.com/hcY9afHumx

— StockCats (@StockCats) December 27, 2016

Maybe just don't play...?

It is one of Wall Street's most popular, longest-running conventions: the Santa Claus Rally has become its own self-fulfilling prophecy, leading to 11th hour gains at the end of any given calendar year, and lasting just into the new year even in the absence of good (or as per the New Normal, bad) news.

Courtesy of Oppenheimer's Ari Wald, here is a quick reminder of what it is:

This article by David Haggith was first published on The Great Recession Blog:

Since Trump’s election, the US stock market has climbed unstoppably along a remarkably steep path to round off at a teetering height. Is this the irrational exuberance that typically marks the last push before a perilous plunge, or is the market reaching escape velocity from the relentless gravity of the Great Recession?