A Credit Suisse banker flew all over the place to meet with clients. He reported:

“Never have we seen so many clients who just do not know what is happening and have cashed up.”

People cash out now because they want to wait until things are “clearer.”  What’s odd is that the market is just a few percent off its all-time high. It would be a strange bull market where so many people cashed out at the top. Normally, people rush to cash out at the bottom.

Jason Zweig’s The Devil’s Financial Dictionary makes fun reading and may be more useful than we know: it recommends speaking plainly and listening to those who speak plainly.

Here’s what it says about uncertainty:

“Certainty, n. A state of clarity and predictability in economic and geopolitical affairs that all investors say is indispensable – even though it doesn’t exist, never has and never will… Whenever turmoil or turbulence becomes obvious, pundits proclaim again for the umpteenth time that ‘Investors hate uncertainty’… “Uncertainty is the most fundamental attribute of financial markets… hating the unknowable is a waste of time and energy. You might as well hate gravity or protest against the passage of time.”

“Cynic, n. A blackguard whose faulty vision sees things as they are, not as they ought to be.”

A broker:  “a negotiator between two parties who contrives to cheat both.”

“Day trader, n. See IDIOT.”

An anecdote about an English proverb“to sell the bear’s skin before one has caught the bear,” which is an apt description of selling a stock short. (You sell the stock first and hope to buy it back later at a lower price.

“PAREIDOLIA, n. The compulsive human tendency to see patterns or meaningful trends in random events and images.”

Fancy words may be a coverup. They hide thefts, lies, cons and ulterior motives. Speak plainly and seek those who speak plainly to you.  Quantitative easing, we now know, is printing money.