We’ve got a strange confluence of events here, and it seems like the market is starting to draw dotted lines toward a more optimistic future… no buy or sell changes from me at the moment, just some musings about recent inflation optimism and China optimism, and how that tied in with some excitement over Berkshire’s disclosure of a Taiwan Semiconductor position… which leads us to look around, as we do most quarters, and see if anything interesting is coming out of the 13F filings of other hedge funds and institutional investors. I’d normally hold off and include these remarks in the Friday File, but things are moving pretty quick right now, and I’ve no shortage of other things to say later in the week, so think of this as an early installment of blatheration from yours truly.

Before I get started, though, I thought I’d use a couple images as caveats… the patterns we may see in the stock market from week to week are not generally part of a grand design, they are products of our imagination.

Many see the economy and the stock market as a giant tanker, steered by tugboats who keep it generally headed in the right direction. We feel like there’s a nameless and faceless cabal of some sort “in charge” — which, depending on your personality, means it’s either comforting or scary.

But in reality, the market is made up of millions of participants, looking for a sign about what to do… it’s more like a murmuration of starlings…

Or a stampede of wildebeest, reacting to a perceived threat (this seems like something nobody should be doing, by the way, but it’s a good illustration of how a stampede can start and how nebulous the “leader” is)…

Or, more pessimistically, a death circle of ants…

It only takes a few stimuli to cause a mass movement of investors, and nobody knows exactly what those events or indicators will be — good signs for the future, moments of panic, weather, astrology, a surprise move from someone who’s perceived as a leader… it’s all quite mysterious.

But sometimes, in the middle of the herd, I do still like to think we can see some patterns begin to emerge… like now, with small shifts in inflation and China and politics and whatever else nudging a few starlings to take ...