Christmas Ramble with a Side of Woo

Sleigh bells?  Chestnuts?  Open fires?  Not around here – not this year.

Mostly sunny and 77 today.  Boxing Day will hit 81. To be sure, the East Texas outback is a different part of the country. Down here in “We say grace, we say mam, if you aint into that we don’t give a damn” country.  Where Hank Junior is a better source of Truth than any politician, yet to hold office.

Still, it’s the system we have, there’s none better, and occasionally things go right.

Here’s a Gift

Don’t know if you caught this the other day, but a Federal judge rules against U.S. Chamber of Commerce trying to stop $100,000 H-1B visa fee.  Frankly, the judge – an Obama appointee – surprised us a bit.  A solid win for (dare we say?) Americans.

I considered blocking some time to work out the possible back room machinations. But there’s a turkey to cook and “sometimes, you just take the win.”

Uncertainty Rules Finance

This is the part where I wheel out the whiteboard, huff a bit of the erasable market fumes and regret being 10-classes shy of my doctorate in business.

Another huff (ahh…) and I’ll hold forth:

See, now through year-end, tax-loss selling acts like a low-grade gravity well across all asset classes, not just equities.  If you don’t know what a gravity well is?  Drop by one of my physics discourses.  (Bring a marker, too…)

Investors harvest losses to offset gains, which means anything down on the year—small caps, speculative tech, thinly traded ETFs, crypto proxies, junior miners, and even some bond funds—can see extra, non-fundamental selling pressure.  During regular times that’s the stuff making up the “noise floor” in trading.

In thin holiday markets, how-such-ever, that pressure is amplified: fewer buyers, wider spreads, and more algorithmic dominance mean prices can gap lower on very little volume. This is why late-December price action often looks “irrational” or disconnected from news—because it isn’t about valuation, it’s about tax positioning and balance-sheet cleanup.

Settlement dates still matter, but less than they used to—and mostly at the margin. I’m old enough to have played this game (oh, so very long ago….) but Life has been simplified.

In the U.S., T+1 settlement means trades executed by the last business day of the year will settle in time for tax purposes, so the urgency is compressed but not eliminated. New Years is still a new tax year.

What matters more now is liquidity, not settlement mechanics. With desks lightly staffed and risk budgets tightened, even modest sell programs can move prices across stocks, bonds, commodities, and crypto.

The flip side is important: once the calendar flips, that artificial selling pressure disappears, often leading to sharp January reversals in the very assets that were punished most in late December.

In short, says Mr. Huffer, year-end markets are less about truth and more about timing—and thin markets make the distortions louder. Mam.

Land Mines of Money

Closer-in, tomorrow is a “normal” trading day, hours-wise.

Monday, though?  Bring your own robot to sniff out the Improvised Economic Devices (IEDs).  Monday begins with Trade figures.  We should be recovered enough from carb overdosing to report on it.

Tuesday the Case-Shiller/S&P/CoreLogic (and whoever else was around) post the Housing Prices.  With rates remaining high, our “power concepts” of money come into play.

Hand me that marker, would you?  (Ahh…)  The way this works is simple.  “Money Power” is the Product of Prices TIMES Volume.

This notion was at the base of Joe Granville’s brilliant On-Balance-Volume calculation which you can read about over here.  Essentially, one share of stock doubling is different than 10-million shares each going down two-bits.

Wednesday next is a Bank Settlement Day.  Which matters because “hot money” matters.  Even now, so does the Japanese Yen carry-trade.

Speaking of which, what country’s Nikkei 225 was up 63 points overnight?

The Nikkei was up about 63 points overnight to (marker, please) roughly 50,400, which sounds impressive until you widen the lens. Zooming out is easier with marker fumes, right?

What most people forget is that back on December 29, 1989, at the peak of Japan’s asset bubble, the Nikkei closed around 38,916. It then spent more than three decades below that level. In real terms, after inflation and opportunity cost, that was a generation of capital going essentially nowhere.

That long arc is what an aging population, weak domestic demand, and the gradual erosion of manufacturing supremacy look like at scale. Japan didn’t collapse; it stagnated.  Now, very, very carefully lift your eyes and look around you….

Asset prices eventually recovered nominally, but only after years of financial repression, currency depreciation, and policy distortion. If you’re trying to figure out what comes next elsewhere, like, oh, um…..Japan isn’t a warning about crashes — it’s a warning about long, grinding plateaus where time, not panic, does the damage.

That Brings us to Thursday Next

Which we all know as “Global Hangover Day.”

(Don’t forget to ‘drop your balls’ Wednesday night.)

If you’ve gotten this far – and were feeling relief that I haven’t bashed the “made up money” crowd, let me put you at ease.  Bitcoin went from a high over $90K Monday to around $87.5K today.

That’s not a behavior of “money.”  That’s a Yo-Yo.

In the Shorts

(Speaking of dropping balls, and such…)

Does he not understand the term “down time?”  Trump tells children he won’t let ‘a bad Santa’ infiltrate US – and discusses ‘beautiful’ coal.  And as the maraschino? Trump calls Democrats ‘radical left scum’ in Christmas Eve message.

Territory is what wars are all about.  So read skeptically Zelensky reveals US-Ukraine plan to end Russian war, key questions remain.

And Europe’s drift into insanity speeds up as EU warns of possible action after the U.S. bars 5 Europeans accused of censorship.  AYFKM? We seem to remember Europe would have lost not one, but two World Wars without American bailouts and now they’re off BSing on how to run the digital world which they were only peripherally involved in building out.  Are they effing kidding us?

ATR:  Drop-In Woo Woo Dreams

In my (long ago) novel DreamOver, I wrote about a naval spook who would wake up in other people’s lives in his dreams.

I get those kind of dreams now and then – so it wasn’t a matter of actively coming up with such a clever “plot device” – it was generalizing what happens in some of my personal lucid dream states.

I thought this one was interesting (and maybe worth telling) because it was holiday themed.

I was on a jetliner coming out of the central US and headed for either Seattle or Vancouver.  But, the plane ran into a problem, so the pilot made a “precautionary landing somewhere in the Midwest.

The plane had been on the ground an hour, or so – and I noted the time in the terminal – it was about 10:50 AM.  Not wanting to be stuck in this (God-forsaken) Midwest town, I demanded a flight back to the region thinking I could drive home.

The desk attendant got me a ticket but oddly the city was “Warrenton” Oregon. Which in the waking state now, must have meant flying to Oregon – PDX. Where I could arrive at 6 PM.

No sooner had the ticketing mess been resolved than the delayed plane was declared safe to fly and people were allowed to reboard but they had to have the right ticket.

I – being clever – or, so I thought, was told “Oh, no…you won’t get in to the destination in the early afternoon because we have already re-ticketed you to arrive in Warrenton tonight…

I tried to get back on and in the process conferred with a fellow named (something like) Preston Hawthorne – who was traveling with a group of about five or six others headed to my original destination…

It was one of those Kafkaesque dreams.  But, on waking, I did the expected scan and found that there was a lot of precautionary landing vibe visiting waking state, too.  In fact, Rescue crews line Shannon Airport runway as 3 Christmas flights make emergency landings – Irish Mirror.

No mention of Warrenton, presently though.  But, it’s not 10:50 AM here in the central U.S. yet, either.

And you thought your dreams were odd, huh?

Cognitive Songinance

A timely “er…what…mate?” for our erstwhile Sailor Stiks who is scouting the Outback for us and issuing reports.  Here.  Where he wrote “A day ahead down under, where women glow and men thunder. ”

And therein lies my excuse for not getting more work done around the ranch Wednesday.  You see, “men thunder” stuck in my ear.  From a life in broadcasting, something was rattling around “He’s just plain wrong on that…”

Well, off to the dust-gathering studio here.  Where  -umpteen Windows 10 updates later – I was able to crank the audio chain to a respectable +107.3 dB peak (and distortion-free) which is close enough to the sound level of a jet APU walking under it on the tarmac as to be indistinguishable volume-wise.

(If you have your speakers cranked, click here for the “Land Down Under” by Men at Work.”

Which Stiks is correct about “thunder” after all it was mentioned (9-times). BUT (and this is 2-hours of updating the music server later) it wasn’t the men who were thundering.  Because the men were plundering.

Cognitive Songinance is a very real post-broadcasting disease…well, sort of.

And on this note, off to the kitchen where a turkey will be my next KitchenAid.

This is what happens when there’s an eggnog shortage in East Texas.  Teach your children well.

Write when I’m full of it,

George@Ure.net

(Need something more to read?  How about Refining the AI–Human SFE Model (and Why It Matters) – Hidden Guild)