What did you always see in movies with a quicksand scene?  Hero and fellow adventurer plodding along through the forest.  Hopeful and intent on making it to the lost temple of treasure, but cautious for danger.  Then all of a sudden…up to their ribs in quicksand and a rapid descent into panic.

Well that’s how the stock markets kind of feel right now, except there’s an unusual amount of calm.  I get the sense that an air pocket can develop to rip 8% to 10% of value from equities.  It would be fast and temporary.  I firmly believe the stock markets will keep moving upward and I actually think we’re going to have a strong Fall and Winter.

I don’t have any charts or article links to share; just a gut feel backed by anecdotal evidence.  Let’s briefly review the negative factors that one would have surmised to have a higher impact on the broad stock market:

– Repo rates flash-spike up to 10%

– Momentum Factor crashes with Value Factor spiking

– Saudi oil processing plant attacked affecting 5% of total world output

– The 10yr. Treasury took a hard spike downwards

– Fed and ECB are cutting rates

I mean all of that just happened in the last 2 weeks and the closing range on a weekly chart in the S&P 500 is right around just 1%.  It doesn’t feel right.  I suspect we could see a delayed reaction to these negatives, which will be exacerbated by the algos.  That’s how we could see a 2-week down-spike.

All the Bears will claim they were right within that first week and the next GFC is surely here.  Then the second week traps the Bears as the Bulls take over by the end of that second week.  I think if we see action like that then it sets the stage for a V-bounce and the start of the next leg in this Bull market to new highs over the holidays.

Those negative events were enough to halt the down-move in treasuries and stave off a correction in gold, but I think that’s also temporary.  Instead of a flight to safety placing a bid underneath longer Treasuries and gold, we could see a flight to cash.

Again, this is only a gut feeling but it keeps nagging me right now.  If this gut feeling becomes a reality, it could look something like this.

Plenty of ways to play that action alone in equities but when you toss in Treasuries and precious metals, it could be a trader’s delight.

Oh, and one last thing on the repo rate spike.  It’s not just a little plumbing issue. That spike up to 10% mattered.  It’s a tell.  If it didn’t matter why exactly would PIMCO say,

In our view, the repurchase (repo) market, where banks and broker-dealers can obtain overnight collateralized loans from intermediaries, is a critical barometer of the health of the financial markets.

Tread lightly…at least temporarily.