WASHINGTON, February 18, 2018: The days seem to fly by so quickly. It seems like we’ve just put away all the noisemakers and slept off our New Year’s Eve overindulgences. But no. We’ve already moved on to celebrate MLK’s birthday in January. Tomorrow, we’ll be celebrating what used to be the Washington’s Birthday celebration, more recently re-christened Presidents’ Day
George Washington Crossing the Delaware. (Public domain image)
What that means for stock and bond traders and investors is that this week’s market fun (or its antithesis) begins Tuesday, February 20 since Presidents’ Day, February 19 is a Federal holiday and all U.S. exchanges and most U.S. banks will be closed.
It also follows that no pre- or after-hours trading sessions will take place on Monday.
Interestingly, our Canadian friends will observe their national Family Day holiday on Monday, too, meaning Canadian markets will be closed as well.
Since the action won’t begin this week until Tuesday, we’ll take the opportunity to catch both ourselves and our readers up on what we think was going on with U.S. stocks and bonds over the past confusing but mostly bullish week.
BTW, we’ve been AWOL recently due to some water leakage issues we’ve been dealing with at our weekend home, namely, a burst intake pipe we’ll have to get dug up and replaced. That will take us away briefly from time to time over the next 10 days or so, meaning spotty columns. But we’ll we’ll still try to keep up with all the stock market action.
Read also: Wacky Wednesday on Wall Street: Inflation spikes, stocks rally anyway
Stocks seem to have launched back into bull market recovery mode almost as quickly as they made us remember 2008, 1987 and 1929 just two, short, miserable weeks ago. The root cause of our most recent heart-stopping may have been stupid mass-trading activities in yet another misunderstood hedge instrument, or instruments: mainly, ETFs and/or ETNs involved with tracking the VIX, a popular market volatility vehicle. It seems as if those computerized hot-shot trading firms still haven’t learned the lesson supposedly learned by wild trading in collateralized debt obligations circa 2007-2010. Idiots.
As for us, our portfolios still have a way to go to achieve breakeven after this year’s early February market debacle. But we made up about half our red ink last week. Fingers crossed. Progress is progress, particularly after a setback. Tomorrow – or Tuesday – is another day.
In the meantime, here’s hoping all our readers enjoy their well-earned holiday tomorrow. We’ll jump back in the investing and commentary pool on Tuesday.
