Bludgeoning Our Allies to Get What We Want

January 19, 2026

Thoughts on the Market

Five days ago I sent out a brief market update discussing my immediate bearish view on the S&P500.  I noted that I had put on a short-dated put spread to play for what I was expecting to be an initial drop of about 3%.  Although I didn’t have any advance notice about Trump’s shocking threat to impose new tariffs on Europe in order to bulldoze our NATO allies into selling Greenland to the U.S., the technical position in the market was sufficiently vulnerable to convince me to place the bet.  In case you liked my idea and put on a similar strategy, you might want to lock in a profit by selling a portion of your position now that the market has tumbled 1 1/2% in overnight trading.