It’s All Good, Sort of…

Readers will be pleased to hear that Alissa Heinerscheid, the Anheuser-Busch marketing whiz responsible for featuring Dylan Mulvaney’s unwholesome mug on cans of Bud Light, appears to have lost her job. A-B reportedly put Heinerscheid on a leave of absence, replacing her with a senior executive.  Since the megabrewer is unlikely to promote Alissa, and because she doesn’t appear to be the kind of gal who would accept a permanent career plateau gracefully, it’s safe to assume she will soon be seeking work elsewhere. The woman was cursed with a face made for radio, but don’t be surprised if she scores a cushy off-camera sinecure at CNN or the White House. We wish her quick and total success as she sinks back into obscurity.

​​The disappointing news is that Anheuser-Busch has yet to apologize for offending the vast majority of its customers by making a flaming fruitcake its spokeswhatever for a quintessentially mainstream brand.  Curiously, even in a world that increasingly seems to reward evildoers and pander to woke wackos, BUD shares look poised for an upside breakout. This is despite a reported 10% drop in Bud Light sales.  Investors evidently believe the brand will rebound fully, but don’t bet on it.

A Medically Concerning Chart

Concerning the chart above, it shows the E-Mini S&Ps in a day-long series of spasms on Friday that would be medically concerning if the S&Ps were human. But guess what!  The S&Ps actually are human insofar as they act to fulfill the conscious and subconscious demands of all market participants at every instant.  Moreover, the human thoughts that animate stocks are often so fraught with fear and greed as to produce price swings wild enough to be labeled aberrational or even psychotic.  Realize that the swings are a perfect visual analog for the conflicting ids and egos of millions of traders and investors as they go about their business. Their instructions cannot but clash because each and every participant has the same objective on a given day: beating everyone else at stock-market pinball.

The moving dot on the chart that does their bidding must fulfill thousands of instructions every nanosecond. However, because the dot can be in only one place at a time, you can imagine how wildly it must foxtrot, shuffle and jitterbug to get it all done. It is a daunting task making certain that as many traders as possible get reamed on a given day. The crazy dot’s frightening unpredictability as it goes about this thankless job reminds me of the nasty little critter in the movie Alien. Remember how it vanished for a couple of minutes, then emerged explosively from a crew member’s chest? To make matters even worse, it dripped acid-blood that melted through the titanium floor of the spaceship.  In a world populated solely by hairy-knuckled S&P traders, critters like this one would be mere house pets.

So where was I going with this?  Ah, yes:  My gut feeling is that the increasingly volatile stock market is close to an important top. Furthermore, anyone who thinks otherwise, especially those who actually believe that shares somehow deserve to be higher, is about to get a whupping. Perhaps they will see the light when the crash in real estate and rentals coming later this year literally hits home?

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