Shall We Call Operation Twist a Resounding Success?

As my friend Mark Gongloff writes, markets have just erased a ton of negatives from the summer swoon in just a very short spurt of time.  First, some stats from WSJ MarketBeat:

The Dow industrials surged 166.36 to 11644.49 today, their highest close since August 3. This was the third straight week of gains for the Dow, the first time that’s happened since April.

The Nasdaq jumped 1.8% to 2667.85. The Dow and Nasdaq are now positive for the year.

The S&P 500, still down 2% for the year, gained 1.7% today to 1224.58, also the highest close since August 3.

Why?

WHY?

WHY? WHY? WHY? WHY? WHY? WHY? WHY? WHY? WHY? WHY? WHY?

There is no “WHY?”  It just is.  It’s not Operation Twist, it’s not a weekly claims number that was 1000 jobs better than expectations in a population of 300 million people.  It’s just the market being the market.

Volume sucked during this run?  Tell me something I don’t know.

“HFT algo traders are running it up.”  Okay, but it still went up.  And the piranhas go home flat everyday, by the way.

“This is just underperforming managers chasing the benchmarks buying high-beta to make up for performance.”  Yeah, that’ll happen from time to time.  And by that I mean “all the time”.

9 percent rallies in a matter of days are par for the course.  They can start out of nowhere and end just as quickly, no explanation necessary unless you’re a reporter on deadline.