If it's a day ending in -day, it means a Dennis Gartman flip-flop is on deck. Here is a brief reminder of his "calls" from just the last few days:
Friday, February 26: Gartman covers his shorts, turns bullish.
We have been short one unit of equities in rather global terms, by being short one third of a unit of US equities; one third of a unit of the EUR STOXX 50 and one third of a unit of the Nikkei. The trade started off properly and almost immediately we were profitable; however we are now almost at a small loss on the trade... We wish to cover the position immediately upon receipt of this commentary, taking a very small profit and refraining from taking a loss and living to fight another day and in the end succeed.
Tuesday, March 1: Gartman is "selling the market short again."
We are selling the markets short once again, having been short recently and having covered that short only a “short” while ago. But we are sellers once again this morning, noting that as the global markets have rallied they have done so on lesser volume on balance. Volume should follow the trend and the trend and volume are pointing lower, not higher.
Wednesday, March 2: Gartman says "we were stunningly, shockingly, stupidly wrong" as he covers shorts, goes long... again.
In our retirement funds here at TGL we moved swiftly to cover our short positions and we moved just as swiftly to buy what we could, when we could and where we could. We covered our derivatives positions and we urge everyone to do the same… immediately. We held on to our long positions in tanker stocks and we actually bought some of the oldest of the old guard dividend paying stocks mid-day just because the market was loudly telling us that we had no choice but to do so.
This is the same day that Gartman also said he "ran to cover our US dollar denominated gold position mid-day and we shall argue strongly that those still long of gold in US dollar terms, as noted above, should do the same." Gold soared, especially after the whole Blackrock share creation fiasco.
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Which brings us to today and the following latest flipflop, when we find Gartman once again "reducing our long positions" as it would be "ill advised to suddenly turn bullish of equities":
At this point, it would be ill advised to suddenly turn bullish of equities but instead at this point it might even be rational and reasonable to consider reducing long positions and become more and more neutral of equities.... we are “short” of a small but important position in derivatives that has reduced our net long exposure to the markets to something only modestly long. Likely we shall be adding to our derivatives positions while reducing our long positions today in order to bring our “net” exposure to something far smaller than it is.
And then this pearl:
Turning to gold, we are obviously not about to change our position here, having been long of gold in EUR and Yen denominated terms for years in the case of the later and for nearly a year in the case of the former, putting to bed, we hope, the reports amongst the blogs that we change our tune rather often. Clearly we do not.
Clearly.
And then the always amusing performance update:
For those who wish to follow our progress, we are up 12.3% for the year-to-date, outperforming our International Index rather pleasantly and outperforming the S&P too by 14.4%. We have been quite lucky thus far this year. We are simply hoping that our good fortune thus far obtains through the remainder of the year. If we continue to “Do more of that which is working and less of that which is not”… perhaps our most important Rule of Trading…
Because flip-flopping every other day pays.
Sarcasm aside, with JPM saying to short, and now Gartman joining on the short side, this makes "life"foralgos difficult, as they are not sure how to trade a market in which the otherwise credible JPM equity team is aligned with the Gartman pemafade. We are confident Goldman will break us out of this unpleasant deadlock soon enough.
However, all of the above is meaningless, if oil continues to surge: with WTI approaching $37, it means that Gartman has only $7 left to live.
We hope oil crashes promptly, or else the market may soon lose what has become the one most flawless leading "indicator" alive.