Quote of the Day: It's All About the Condition...

Brexit was supposed to topple the markets, and it did, for two whole days. Trump's election was supposed to send the Dow down quadruple digits, and it nearly did, for a few hours in pre-market trading. In both instances sentiment was sour going in and the general technical setup was positive. In terms of sentiment, when everybody's on the fear side of the boat the sellers have pretty much already sold, turning them into panicky buyers when they open their eyes and find the boat still floating or, I should say, the market not sinking.

I can't tell you how many times over the past thirty two years I've witnessed a given event or development that was construed to be good or bad appear to produce the opposite result in the markets. As it turned out, each instance occurred when the conditions, or what I like to call the setups, were ripe for a counter-intuitive move.

Per Edwin Lefevre's incomparable 1923 classic Reminiscences of a Stock Operator:

Not even a world war can keep the stock market from being a bull market when conditions are bullish, or a bear market when conditions are bearish. And all a man needs to know to make money is to appraise conditions.