1/9. As a veteran of markets, I thought I had seen it all: oil exploding amid the two 70s oil crises, the S&P falling 20% on Black Monday, Japan's bubble imploding after the Nikkei peaked on Christmas day 1989, Soros tipping sterling out of the ERM on Black Wednesday,...

2/9...the baht & rupiah imploding during the Asian crisis, the Russian crisis and LTCM, the dot com bubble burst, quant fund blow-up in August 2007, Lehman's collapse in September 2008, taper tantrum of 2013, Volmageddon of February 2018 and the Covid crash of February 2020.

3/9. The old adage is that markets go up on escalators and down in elevators, and what unites all the experiences above is that they are of the elevator ilk. Generally, rising markets don't have a day, week or month with which they are tagged. There is no 'Golden Friday'.

4/9. But I will remember last week for a very long time. The rise in Tesla's stock was breathtaking: a 1 trillion dollar company acting like a penny stock. I've seen large caps levitate before. While trading Japanese equities, Softbank could produce some thrilling moves.

5/9. But this is an order of magnitude more extreme. Softbank's moves were measured in the tens of billions, Tesla's jumps are in the hundreds. The one-week move in Tesla was equivalent to the combined market cap of the 3 largest UK companies: AstraZeneca, Uniliver & Shell.

6/9. Nasdaq, meanwhile, put on a mere 3.5% for the week. But this was against the backdrop of - Earnings guidance disappointment from Apple, Amazon & Facebook - Rising US bond yields - J-Powell's 1st admission that inflation is a problem - US GDP growth disappointment

7/9. - Bank of Canada unexpected announcement of end of QE - Short end jump in rates in EU & Aus suggesting early tightening - Rapid rate hikes in Brazil & Russia - Continued bad news out of China on property crash - Weak growth data basically everywhere in the world

8/9. And yet US VIX remains on the floor! Then we have the anecdotal stuff. Elon's TITS joke, Zuckerberg wanting to leave reality behind completely and migrate into the Matrix with Meta, Shiba Inu competing with Dogecoin to see who gets 1st to a market cap of $50 billion. WTF!

9/9. I am starting to question my own sanity. Am I dreaming this stuff up or is it really happening? If it is reality, then at least in my dotage I can say, "yes, I did witness Black Monday first hand, but it was nothing as mind-numbingly strange as Mad October".