Oh, for God’s sake.  People are crazy.  Little changes in the perception of future risk cause us all to think that we’re either all going to get rich right away, or we’ll all going to go broke tomorrow… not a lot of nuance in this world.  News was mostly positive last week and this week, leading to more certainty that the Fed will cut rates and that we’re not actually in a recession and maybe the world won’t go to hell in a handbasket… and the market approaches new highs again.  Next week, it might be a different story, maybe the honeymoon ends for Vice President Harris at the Convention, Fed Chair Jerome Powell will stub his toe and fall off the stage at the Jackson Hole symposium next week, or former President Trump will do something that gets people revved up, or maybe we’ll hear about a huge fraud from some big public company, or there will be missiles flying between Tehran and Tel Aviv… or from Russia into Warsaw.

The lesson I take from my 54 trips around the sun is that the world is full of surprises, and I almost always find them surprising, so I shouldn’t pretend that I know when they’re going to surprise us next.

But after a brief panic two weeks ago in the market that sent volatility screaming higher… it’s back down to “all’s well” levels.  Which means if you wanted to put on some hedge positions because you worry about the possibility of a big market downturn in the next few months, now’s probably a decent time.  Some common hedges, like equity index put options, are back to being relatively affordable again.  They’re still probably going to go to zero, be a waste of money, and end up making you feel stupid, since that’s how the markets usually work, but if they help you sleep at night, well, at least that peace of mind is cheaper than it was last week.  I’m contrarian enough to be more worried in weeks like this than I was two weeks ago, but that doesn’t mean my worries will lead to prescience — I’m hedged against crazy stuff happening in the silly season from now through October, to some degree, but that might just mean that the world comes to an end in November.  Or sometime next ...