I’m typing this starting text on Sunday afternoon after writing all of the Charts bit on Saturday night. I’m well pleased that I did it this way because I was feeling pretty good last night, but today it is not too bad but definitely worse than I would like.
If you are a bit behind, I have had some sort of problem in my abdomen area for 6 months and 4 Doctors have been baffled as to what the problem is; until finally a trip to A&E when I felt extremely bad a week or so ago, came up with the idea that it could be down to excess Stomach Acid burning my Stomach Wall. Sounds horrible.
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I am starting this on Saturday Night, as is my tradition these days because it is easier to break the task of writing these blogs into two bits. I am utterly trashed because I thought I would take advantage of the pleasant weather and go for a long push around my locality. Of course, as is always my way, I never know what my limits are and I ended up going probably much further than I should have, and as a result my health problems are really irritating me and I feel utterly exhausted and drained.
With all this Lockdown stuff I have felt that I have had very little exercise and in recent weeks I have been getting out and pushing around to try to get my heart rate going and stuff. This is probably a good idea but I tend to make the error of coming to a particular road and thinking, “Oh, I wonder where that road leads to?” and of course I am far too stupid than to actually take my Fone with me and to use Google Maps (where’s the fun in that?).
This is such a strange time with the Coronavirus madness still dominating the Economic picture, and governments borrowing crazy amounts of money, and Central Banks mucking around and suchlike; and yet Markets just look almost like nothing can stop them going up.
It is very normal to get a Spring sell-off and it looked quite possible that something was going to start at the end of March, but again the Bulls shook it off and even the likely highly over-valued Nasdaq, kept on moving up. This ability by Bulls to repel the advances of the Bears on the battlefield, shows an underlying strength that could easily keep going. And I suspect it will.
A pretty good week as it happens, with Stocks doing nicely and I saw some excellent gains being reported on Twitter so the change of mood we had at the end of February seems to have been shaken off already. Of course the Nasdaq is behind a bit and the fabled ‘Rotation’ away from Growth to Value does seem to be taking place. Having said that it could easily be described more simply as a shift from Tech to Cyclicals. It is notable that we seem to have wobbled a bit as we got to both the end of January and the end of February.
There is no doubt plenty of sense in the Tech stuff getting more scrutiny because Valuations have been getting quite mad in a lot of cases; but I can’t help thinking that some Cyclicals are already looking pretty hot. One that has surprised me is On The Beach OTB, which I hold, which has now got higher than it was before the March 2020 collapse and that is quite amazing when you think how many challenges the Holiday Sector faces.
I had a mixed week with my Portfolio just scraping through with a tiny hit and with a visit to my Doctor back on Monday which involved some good news really, but also a bit of not-so-good news.
Prior to the visit to the Surgery (first time since the C19 shenanigans and it was a bit strange with all the PPE requirements and all that), I had a District Nurse come round and take some blood samples; so it was great to hear that they found nothing in the blood and it looks like I might have a few years left in me yet (just as well because the Blog backlog is insane).
From what I can tell those words are the title of an album by Lewis Capaldi and it did make me smile (to be fair, he probably didn’t mention BGO). I heard it during an interview with Ken Bruce on Radio 2 the other day and although I am no fan of his ‘work’, I must say Lewis was a great interviewee and has a charming self-deprecating manner.
I am so pleased to be about 95% ‘fixed’ now and incredibly the root of my difficulties seems to have been because a Doctor had told me to take Senna Tablets (nothing to do with Ayrton Senna but they do make you go fast !!) which are clearly quite a powerful laxative. I always assumed they were pretty mild because they are just chopped up and dried plant stuff, but I learnt the hard way that they are seen as quite ‘aggressive’ by the Health people.
So Monday in particular and then the remains of the Week, turned out to be pretty momentous with both the fundamental news of a potential Vaccine and the Biden win (most likely tempered by the Republicans keeping control of the Senate), but also from a technical viewpoint the Markets have done some pretty significant stuff which I will come onto later in the Charts bit.
I got caught out on Monday and this hurt my returns for the week, although I didn’t really do much ‘wrong’ that I can actually fix as such. If anything, my only error was in having a FTSE100 Short Hedge which was too large and I should have kept it more in line with the level of Long Exposure I had in my Spreadbet Portfolio; in reality it was probably about 50% higher than the ideal.
I’m typing this first chunk of text on Saturday Night, and from what I am hearing it looks like Grandpa Biden will be the New President and with any luck the craziness of the Trump Administration will now go away. Although of course, none of the division within the Country will be resolved and it is remarkable how the US is split 50/50 down the middle, in a similar way to how the UK was over the Brexit Vote.
Of course nobody can know what the next 4 years will bring, although what we do know is that the American Public have somehow managed to orchestrate a Political Machine that will be pretty powerless and unable to get almost anything done. With the Republicans still holding power in the Upper House, then it will be quite a challenge for the Democrats to get much new Legislation through and on the plus side for Markets, it should mean that the more extreme Left-wing policies should hit the buffers.
Of course it would have been extremely rude of me to not take advantage of the sunshine on Friday and to spend a delightful lunchtime in the garden of the White Hart with a few investing mates, and hopefully I can squeeze in a few more such afternoons before the Indian summer finally gives up the ghost.
Or perhaps more pertinently, before we are banned from going to Pubs again. This meant that I wasn’t particularly focused on what the markets were doing on Friday but I can’t say I was hugely shocked to see the US Markets coming off quite a lot and the FTSE100 also had a bit of a weak day. With the incessant narrative of impending Second Lockdown Doom, it is no surprise that people are hesitant to buy Stocks and we can combine this with the upcoming US Presidential Elections, Autumn being traditionally weak, and US Tech massively overbought, and the ingredients are clearly there for more downside.
Amongst several other big potentially negative events like no Trade Deal in the ongoing Brexit discussions and all the chaos a messy Presidential Election Campaign in the US could cause, the clear big looming threat is the likelihood of a Second Lockdown which seems to be increasing by the day.
There is no doubt the number of Infections is rising rapidly and I heard on one of the TV News Broadcasts that they were doubling every 7 days across the UK – that seems fast but at the height of the first problems they were doubling every 3 days. It is very possible that the Infections speed up though and that may not be helped by the Government saying the restriction to 6 people meeting up will come in from Monday – it is obvious that many groups of people are going to party like crazy over the weekend and feed the inferno. |
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