Helene Meisler On What's Going On With the Stock Market Now

Joe Weisenthal (0:10)

Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots Podcast. I'm Joe Weisenthal.

Tracy Alloway (0:15)

And I'm Tracy Alloway.

Joe Weisenthal (0:17)

Tracy, you've been on vacation for a couple weeks. Welcome back. It's nice to be back in the studio with you. Actually, I think it's like our first time recording in the studio in like almost a month.

Tracy Alloway (0:24)

Yeah, that's right, because I very nicely got to record some episodes remotely. I hesitate to say this, but what did I miss?

Joe Weisenthal (0:33)

Well, I mean, in a way, I think you actually, it was not a bad couple of weeks to sort of take off and tune out, but there have been some interesting developments in the market. I would say the first half of your vacation, we had this like continuation of this like very powerful rebound off the bottom of the stock market that caught a lot of people by surprise.

And then the second half of your vacation, like over the last week or so, we've given some of it back.

Tracy Alloway (1:01)

Yeah, when I left, stocks were still going up. And now I've come back and it seems like we've done a round trip to where they were when I left in early August. I think it was August 8th.

And it's kind of been a weird summer for stocks, hasn't it? Because I think we had the best start to a third quarter since like the early 1930s. And we even saw a bunch of the meme stocks doing really, really well. And then I've come back and it seems like it's just a bloodbath across the board.

Joe Weisenthal (1:29)

I know, like while you were gone, like AMC became a story again, and Bed Bath and Beyond became a story again. And Adam Newman got 350 million from entries in Horowitz. And I was like, oh my God, Q3 of 2022, this is just like Q1 2021 again, or 2019 or something again. It's tricky too, because the macro situation, which we know is very elevated inflation and a Fed determined to stamp it out, right? And so, one of the oldest cliches in investing is like, don't fight the Fed, right? Like you hear that a million times, you hear it all the time, really. That is a cliche. Remember you made fun of me the other day for some cliche that wasn't actually a cliche about the grid or, anyway, that actually is a cliche. So you have the Fed doing a lot of work to like stamp out inflation.

And if you're believing the don't fight the Fed thing, it's like, it's very bold to sort of be bullish at a time when the Fed is in tightening mode.

Tracy Alloway (2:25)

Yeah, well, I mean, it feels like everything is sort of being driven by macro at the moment, but no one really knows what the macro picture is gonna shake out as, right? Cause either you have inflation continue or you get a big recession because the Fed is raising rates and trying to cut demand and bring prices down that way. Or, you know, I think the nightmare scenario for a lot of people is that you get both those things, but it all seems quite like tail risky, if that makes sense.

Joe Weisenthal (2:52)

Well, you mentioned the nightmare scenario and I think that really is a good lead in to our episode today because sentiment has been extremely negative. And so if you look at various surveys of professional fund managers, individual investors, you know, Q2 this summer may injure an extremely pessimistic overall. Which might, if some of the positioning, the Bank of America has a fund manager survey, they, I think at the last survey, sentiment was like just a little bit better than apocalyptic was how they characterized it.

Tracy Alloway (3:25)

Well, it was worse than the 2008 financial crisis. I know that for sure. And that was even as stocks were recovering. And that's why people were calling this, you know, the most hated rally of all time and things like this.

Joe Weisenthal (3:36)

And so that sort of like gets into our conversation today, which is like, what's going on with the stock market? And how do you like think about how investors are positioned? What are the charts saying? What are the surveys saying?

And yeah, like what is the overall positioning? So it should be a good episode for sort of thinking about what we've seen in the stock market really over the last several weeks and months.

Tracy Alloway (3:56)

Yeah, I'm looking forward to it.

Joe Weisenthal (3:57)

Okay, I am so excited about our guest. This is like a guest that I've been wanting, literally wanting to speak to for literally years. We've never been able to like quite make it happen with scheduling just because it's hard. But finally, we're going to have her on. I'm so excited. We're gonna be speaking to Helene Meisler. She is a columnist for Real Money, but also a long time veteran of markets, having traded at Cowen, having traded at Goldman Sachs on the equity trading desk, doing technical analysis, managing money for Cargill.