I don’t know where the stock market is going to go in the next few months, but I know what I’m willing to pay to acquire shares of companies that I think have strong futures… so my general stance is to remain a nibbler during these uncertain times as those companies become available at my price. And that’s probably good, in the end — if times were not uncertain, there wouldn’t be many attractive ideas available at reasonable prices, a position we sometimes found ourselves in last year (and in retrospect, that was even with my idea of “reasonable” getting regrettably inflated, as I internalized some of the market’s enthusiasm).

If there’s an armistice in Ukraine, or if the common expectation begins to be that China will gets its shit together with vaccinating the elderly and can reopen its economy, or even if inflation continues to ease from these high levels, uncertainty can disappear quickly. We don’t know whether we’re on the cusp of a prolonged bear market or terrible inflation cycle, or whether today was the bottom — and more important, we can’t know. It certainly feels like the first wave of a big bear market, and the last day or two feels like a little bear market rally that’s just bringing a pause in the pain, but feelings and hunches aren’t great forecasters — I would have guessed that we’d end this week on a much uglier note, since nobody likes to hold onto risk going into a long weekend, but that just goes to show you how wrong I’m going to be when I try to predict what will happen in the market on any given day or week. The sensible course? Keep that cash balance high, make sure you’re not getting more aggressive than you can handle, for sure (if you can’t sleep, you’re being too aggressive — sleep is important), but try to spend your brainpower on things we can hope to understand, not on the ineffable variations in future investor sentiment.

If we are looking for clues about a coming recession, they are everywhere — but there’s no real prize to be won for deciding when the economy is technically going to go into a recession or come out of a recession. The average return during a recession (which is a specific period of time determined by the National Bureau for Economic Research, which ...