Six months ago, I don’t know if anyone would have believed that we could have a seriously weak Apple (AAPL) quarter, continuing to demonstrate their failure to grow as China challenges continue and the latest iPhone fails to excite customers… but that the stock market would have one of its best weeks of the year, anyway.

I suppose we mostly have shifting perceptions about interest rates to thank. The Federal Reserve continued to talk tough about inflation, but didn’t raise rates this week (they had telegraphed this, pretty much everyone knew it was coming)… and then this morning, the unemployment numbers came out of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and they showed, finally, a rise in unemployment and softness in hourly wages which investors are hoping will mean that the Fed is going to again ease monetary conditions and cut rates sometime next year.

That’s all guessing about trends which haven’t really established themselves yet, of course — we don’t know whether a tick down in employment, partially goosed by the UAW strikes, will continue, and therefore slow down the economy a little and reduce inflation… but this one solid data point that points to employment easing up a little (one in a row, woohoo!) means that there’s a pretty dramatic shift in consensus on Wall Street toward believing in the “Goldilocks” or “Soft Landing” scenario (where the economy slows down just enough to finally tamp down inflation, but not so much that we go into a serious recession).

I’m as hopeful as the next guy, but I’m no economic forecaster (and the people who are actual forecasters, I should perhaps point out for those new to this world, also don’t know what’s going to happen — in the words of John Kenneth Galbraith, “the only function of economic forecasting is to make astrology look respectable”).

So we’ll just try to be prepared for any kind of economic environment in the year ahead, owning quality companies who can survive bad times and thrive in good times and being cautiously diversified, and maybe letting that cash balance build up a bit now that it comes with a 4-5% yield, and we’ll see how it goes.

As of this week, that shift to a fuller belief in a “soft landing” has meant an increased bet by traders that the Fed will cut rates sometime in the ...