One Big Fat F***ing ETF, Deal With It

Keep picking stocks if you’d like, but here’s the reality…

From Bloomberg via the San Francisco Chronicle:

The Chicago Board Options Exchange S&P 500 Implied Correlation Index posted its biggest gain in two years of data this week, sending its closing average since Oct. 11 to 78.21, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. That’s the highest level for the first 16 days of a reporting season, data show.

Traders are betting U.S. equities will move in unison as investors react to news about Europe’s attempts to end its debt crisis. More than 400 stocks in the S&P 500 moved in the same direction in three of the last four days. Investors first snapped up shares when Europe’s leaders agree to expand the region’s bailout fund and then fled equities when Greece said it would hold a referendum on the plan.

“It’s been brutal,” Philip Orlando, who helps oversee about $350 billion as chief equity market strategist at Federated Investors Inc. in New York

Yeah, I don’t know about “brutal”, I probably call it “a waste of time”…unless you’re selling people on your ability to be in the right stocks at all times.  In that case, carry on, what choice do you have but to pretend this isn’t happening right now?

It’s a binary market – risk-off or risk-on depending on which side of the bed any given finance minister in Brussels wakes up on that morning.  The market has become One Big Fat F***ing ETF, deal with it.

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