Gearing

Very often it's better to not listen to the news, or the hype of all the mad things happening in the world around us. Most of the time, it's better to just sit down and focus on the things that we can measure. So to a large extend we try to do that this week, although we must admit the the blue wave in the U.S. is probably the primary driver behind the strength we saw last week. It's very likely going to be the source of a whole lot more strength in the week ahead.

The weather in the northern parts of South Africa is likely to be a little wild in the week ahead. We just hope that the hurricane that has made landfall in Mozambique does not cause large scale damage. Spending the week indoors, sadly, is nothing new thanks to lockdown. Now we just have to hope that the coal stays dry so that we don't have electricity disruptions. These are strange times to be living in to be sure. At least we have markets to look at and keep us busy while a hurricane and a virus rage outside.

The U.S. market is closed on Monday for Presidents' Day, which means that our market will likely be rather quiet at the start of the week. Overall though, the bullish trend is strong and has been for some time. I rang some alarm bells last week, although it seems that I was wrong. This doesn't mean that we should all rush out and put on a thousand new long positions. Patience, caution, always.

Volatility is subsiding and markets are feeling more confident than they have for some time. We can debate about logic and valuations and inflation for days on end. In the end though, it will boil down to "yes, nothing makes sense" and "don't fight the FED". The money printer is going brrrr and all we can do is hold tight while the bulls give another run.

We've said a few time in the past that patience is key. The main benefit of being patient when it comes to trading is that we can wait for the really good setups to mature and then take trades in which the odds are firmly skewed in our favour. Some of the stocks we've been watching for a long time have finally triggered buy signals.