Did Gartmant just jinx yesterday's selloff? You decide, from his morning note:
Finally, this is the time for retaining what liquidity we can muster; this is not a time for courage. Get smaller; get liquid and get safe. Things turned ugly yesterday and today we fear is but a brief respite.
And then there is this, following Gartman's latest 24 hour "bullish oil" flip flop on oil:
In retrospect we should have been slower in turning from an overtly bearish posture on crude oil to one that was bullish, and even more properly we probably should have put our bullish posture into effect using options rather than a direct futures position. We shall consider that in the future. Certainly it would have been less “harmful.”
Having been bearish of crude oil for a very long while, it is time no longer to be bearish, but perhaps we were indeed a bit too early in turning bullish. Better, in hindsight, it would have been to have been on the sidelines following Friday’s weakness in the capital markets, knowing that Monday would be a disaster. Lessons are always being learned.
But others took us to task a great deal more disconcertingly, calling upon us to close our business; to take up another vocation; to stop making “calls” and as one “pundit” rather comically suggested we should go have sexual relations with our self. But we know of no other perspective to take but to admit our mistakes when they happen, even if they are created by outside, short term agencies over which we have no control and which develop out of the thinnest of short term air. We have no choice but to live to fight another day and the chaos of yesterday forced that down hard upon us.
But why on earth should Gartman close business? He provides what are arguably the best market calls in history - as long as one does the opposite, of course - plus he is funny.
