What a ride the beginning of the year has been so far. As we warned in our year end and 2019 outlook, the equity markets were most likely set up for some bottom pickers to step in and show their support out of the gates.
This is going to be a quick note with some charts due to the Thanksgiving holiday week. We continue to see bounces being sold into in terms of the equity markets. Our readers have been well informed of our sentiment and despite expecting this to continue, we do expect some bounces to occur now and then. The larger global macro theme hinges on the FEDs continued hikes and deteriorating global cohesion theme.
As we count down the remaining weeks of summer, we hope you enjoyed a bit of a reprieve from these markets. We hope you found some time to break away and enjoy the weather, enjoy an outdoor activity and found that there is life outside of our digital screens and everyday ups and downs of our markets. We have the luxury of beautiful Lake Michigan here in Chicago and for those looking for some nice day trips, SW Michigan offers many an amenity as does Wisconsin to our north. We like to take a break during summer and head up to Lake Geneva and enjoy one of the hidden, well not so hidden anymore gems of the Midwest. This weekend was the annual Driehaus customer appreciation party which always offers some of the best fireworks of the season, sorry Richard, I let the cat out of the bag, but you do put on a nice display. Richard is founder and manager of Driehaus Capital Mgmt here in Chicago for those wondering. Hats off to his annual fireworks display as we enjoyed some never before seen pyrotechnics, great work. It's always tough driving back to the concrete jungle but as our favorite fictional character Gordon Gekko (Wall Street 1987) always said, "Money never sleeps, pal!" So despite the FOMC week, which presented nothing out of the ordinary, the markets seem to be stuck in an ever decreasing VIX and ever increasing deterioration of the global economic indicators. As we have said time and time again, this market is centrally bank driven and thus, truly nothing else matters. The only things that seem to matter are charts like this:
