Down goes the Dow

Big jump in the VIX this morning, currently showing as nearly 37 at CNBC, home of the carnival barker. I guess that would normally be a good buy signal, but one might consider what the markets looked like after it hit that point in 2008. Pretty sure it was over 2 years before the markets regained their position from that day. The time to regain lost ground will depend on how deep the drop is and how quick the following rebound, both of which are largely unpredictable. Everyone hang onto your hats!

Oil’s up, but fluctuating a bit.

VIX is up, that’s for sure.

Gold up a bit.

Hopefully my oil etc will float me today. So far my cash has been hedging any losses well👍

Hi Idiot I have been up pretty much the whole night, arranging euro stuff—but I just made a coffee and turned on CNBC.

We are brothers!😂

I thought that SQQQ would work out...

Igy the things I bought have good liquidity, except for RSGUF, and maybe RDS-B.

Does anybody still buy penny stocks?

Got my first cup of coffee down here, up periodically during the night, up for good at 4:00 am.

My best guess for market short term downside from the peak -30% NASDAQ and -20% S&P 500. A quick Russian military takeover of Ukraine would lessen market downside, in my view. Interesting historical time, and really the market has been there for several years. Now the market experiences the negative consequences of unhinged government policies and the social consequences they unleashed.

What a day, already.

I guess none of your price targets will be triggered yet, huh?

El-Erian tries to make the case that inflation must be tolerated if the economy is to continue. If true, and I think it is, I will be buying hold, preferably below 2k. Not a ton, but at least some. I will buy it vaulted in Schweiz. Times like these favor mattress-stuffing, model train-building, tidy whitey-wearing gold bugs, and even though current events might subside, I feel like this is only the first in a series of such events going forward.

If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em. Vaulted Swiss gold. I can get a physical receipt for it from someone I actually know, a real person.

otoh maybe I should vault some sugar and coffee instead.

The hipsters were buying them until they began to get burned.

WTF all oil up but BP down almost 5% in premarket in the US.

Pressure from the index?

I should have had a sedative instead of coffee😂. Down 5% would erase all my remaining 2022 BP gains, if it holds. Fascinating.

When things get really bad the safest asset is the one most shunned, cash.

Bitcoin well down. Getting ready for today’s margin calls!

Institutions selling what they can? Booking profits for an uncertain future? Knowing the cure for higher prices, is higher prices? Like you said, tied to the index?

There will be lots of conversations today between risk officers and portfolio managers. These will center on raising cash, and lowering exposure to riskier positions. On the retail side, margin calls and liquidations. Very busy day for those folks. The will act very quickly to lower risks to their firms.

And on a personal note, it strikes me that many things come full circle.

Years ago, when I was a younger man, maybe about racket's age or probably a few years younger, I trained to fight the dirty Russians and their dirty commie friends, learned their tactics, memorized their tables of equipment and was able to automatically recognize their vehicles, weapons and aircraft.

That was before the wall fell, near the end of the Cold War when west (the good guys) and east (the bad guys) were firmly entrenched on either side of the Iron Curtain. Fast forward a few years after the wall came down, and I found myself pillaging a closing military base in Europe to retrieve equipment we needed elsewhere, as both sides loosened their toe holds and started drawing down their numbers as we all became friends.

In my short military service I was in pseudo-danger (i.e., a bit scary but no honest threat to my life) three times. The first time, in an encampment surrounded by marginally hostile hosts in a former soviet republic, shots were fired into the camp, causing a stir but no ill effects. The second and third times were on the same day a few weeks later, first landing in a Russian Antonov at an airfield with mortars flying across one end of the runway, and soon after inside a Ukrainian BRDM armored personnel carrier, attracting sniper fire with the top open and our heads all out (initially) enjoying the scenery. That was about 30 years ago, when both the Russians and Ukrainians were our hesitant new friends and mostly-former enemies.

I've visited at least half of the former Warsaw Pact countries over the past dozen or so years, and I have numerous friends and acquaintances who trained on the other side, before the wall fell, to fight me (us) as part of the then-Soviet war machine. Some of those friends found military action against each other as their various nations moved, one at a time, toward democracy, but not without a bit of a fight in some cases. Others fought internally as uprisings to varying degrees were needed in some places to make the transition. One was faced with an existential choice to follow the orders of his political adviser and support Ceaucescu or join the rebellion. He picked the winning side that day and lived to become my friend. A different friend seems to have taken the wrong side in the 2016 failed coup in Turkey and we've not heard from him since.

I was in Kiev a few years ago, some time after the 2014 revolution and incursion by Russia into Crimea. I saw a place in the Maidan Square where they had ripped up the cobblestones to build a barricade and to use as weapons against government forces. After the uprising, the city evidently wanted to repave the road with asphalt, but the locals said no farking way, they might need the cobblestones again. I wonder whether somebody has ripped them up again.

History is full of misadventures like the one beginning now, including at least two failed, massive, multi-year attempts by megalomaniac, charismatic evil geniuses with little big man syndrome trying to march between western Europe and Moscow (not to mention the numerous incursions back and forth by various failed empires over prior centuries). I expect this will eventually end the same way, but I wonder how big it will get and how long it will take, and at what needless cost. I see some signs that this may be much bigger than what it seems on the surface. I hope that's wrong.

When I'm soon retired from my not-remotely-close-to-military career, I think the next generation of young military recruits may be dusting off some of the old tables of Russian equipment and tactical doctrine stuff I had to consume in my youth. And so it goes...

It is being attributed to its Rosneft exposure.

Market if full meltdown over fake Russian invasion of Ukraine.

Go to livestreams of Kiev. Nothing happening

From Russian fake news (?):

english.pravda.ru

Ukrainian Navy destroyed completely in less than 400 minutes

@pravdareport

The Russian troops landed in the largest ports of Ukraine. According to unconfirmed reports, the Russian military captured the city of Mariupol

Link:english.pravda.ru/news/hotspots/150431...