OK, so not today.
But the whole thing is starting to make me nauseous. I almost threw up when I saw a Dow 20,000 hat. What we want is for no one to recognize it. That the event comes and passes without any sort of hoopla.
Maybe because I have lived through so many thousand crossings, I just think they are the ultimate in bad -- let me get the technical term -- karma where all of the negativists really get to poke fun and holes into anyone who is bullish even if they have been bullish for some time.
It's almost as if the thing you most want to do is hit 20,000 and just go negative, just say, "OK, I have been positive, but that's it, I am out of here."
Why not do that?
Simple: For someone like me, the Dow means so little that I was going to drop it from my performance letters in 2000, my last year as a hedge fund manager. It just seemed dumb to focus on it.
Not only that, but if you like to talk about individual stocks, you are often being antithetical for liking the Dow. You want Pfizer (PFE) and Caterpillar (CAT) ? What's the theme there?
But the issue is the scrutiny, and this market doesn't need the scrutiny. I have endlessly talked about what can go wrong within the context of liking the market, and at Dow 20,000 the "what will go wrong" group will quickly overshadow those who like the market, especially as I expect program selling to kick in if we do get there -- and yes, I see the irony of writing "if," not when.
I think the real scrutiny should be on the people who endlessly downgraded a First Horizon (FHN) or a Key (KEY) -- they don't quit -- or who had a sell on CAT or Western Digital (WDC) or who upgrades Nvidia (NVDA) now.
These are the people who are the goats, not the soon-to-be alleged goats, who wear the Dow 20,000 hat knowing that it's really more of a bull's-eye than it is a chapeau.
