The Risk-Off Crowd: Like a Jew on Christmas

As you know, I’m out today at a conference in DC.  In absence, my regular contributor the Stock Rabbi wanted to talk about what it must feel like for the uninvested on a day like today, please enjoy! – JB

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Oy Veys Mir!  Can you imagine sitting in 100% cash on a day like today awaiting the bottom to fall out?  The horror!  The schpilkas!

The Dow is up 300 points as of this writing on a combination of the strong Q3 GDP report coupled with a quasi “solution” out of the European Economic Disaster Zone (the EEDZ for those who adore acronyms as I do).

Getting more heavily invested this month given the headwinds was certainly challenging, for many of us it went against all our gut instincts and logical reasoning and emotional underpinnings to such an extent as to generate a loss of sleep.

But it was the right move in retrospect – seasonality, sentiment and technicals all lined up and you had to simply tune out the permanently risk-off crowd to do it.  Don’t get me wrong, the Bob Janjuahs and the Albert Edwardses and the Zero Hedges make for excellent reading, but they are always one-note – negativity from those quarters is not borne of rigor but of schtick.  Henny Youngman had one-liners, Rodney Dangerfield had the no respect routine and the perma-bears’ schtick is that nothing can ever stop the eventual devolution of human society.

Well today, that risk-off crowd truly knows what it feels like to be left out and uninvited to the party.  The perma-bear, who will never accept that the world’s end isn’t right around the corner, feels a bit like a Jew on Christmas.  Should those in 100% cash begin making their first buys here, today?  Probably not.

Like most Jews on Christmas, they may want to simply go out for some Chinese food and await the next opportunity.  Which will undoubtedly come, bubbeleh, it will come.

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