This market gets it wrong so often we have to wonder whether there really are any "tells" left. For most of my career the broader market told you something. It gave you a signal of its own direction. We started calling that hinting "tells," a term coined from the great David Mamet movie
House of Games. In that movie, Ricky Jay, one of Mamet's faves, and arguably the world's best magician, says that he can forecast events by watching for tells. If you are playing cards, maybe you wipe the sweat off your brow every time you have a full house. If you are hiding a coin in one of your hands behind your back, you might point to the hand with the coin subconsciously with your nose.
These days, though, the tells are all wrong. Take yesterday. I, like everyone else who is still in this tortured game, was listening to
Alan Greenspan talk about how January and February were up months vs. December (tell that to
Cisco(CSCO Quote)!). If you believed the Fed would ease aggressively, Greenspan's comments were the worst possible interpretation of what is happening right now -- so you had to sell the market.
At that very moment, a giant buy program hit the floor. Ah ha! Did someone know something we didn't? Was there more testimony coming that counteracted Greenspan's positive analysis of January and February? Was the chairman going to spring a surprise? Do we need to go in and buy something because this is the long-awaited bottom? Nah, as we know from
Todd Harrison's incredible column, it turns out that the knuckleheads in Chicago were ganging up on some other knucklehead who had bought a lot of
S&P calls, was blowing out of them and then stopped. It was a classic short-squeeze that gave you one more chance to blow out of the baddies before they took the market down again.
Extraordinary. A totally false tell. You don't get those in real life.
As an aside, I got to meet Ricky Jay in real life. He had me put a quarter behind my back and switch hands each time. For 20 straight times he guessed the correct hand. He would not reveal the tell. I wish he would come forward and reveal the tell for this market. I can't find it anymore.
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Jim Cramer
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