Are we officially in the process of being caught off guard?
I wasn’t even going to write a note this morning, because it’s Sunday and I have a couple pieces planned for the week to come. But then I had an interesting set of realizations this morning while walking to get my coffee:
Many young people on Wall Street nowadays have never experienced real volatility in markets
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and inflation at 7.5% in the U.S. are two extremely different, complex and unmapped pieces of terrain that we are going to be forced to navigate
In other words, we have a ton of inexperienced market participants that should be bracing for the economic shock of their lifetimes, but they’re not - they’re still at the stage where walking around Manhattan in Patagonia vests, drinking Starbucks and making dinner reservations at whatever douche-motel is trendy this week are among their top concerns.
This wasn’t a big deal when I first pointed out in November that I thought the NASDAQ could crash. We
