In one old Irish folktale, one night on All Hallows’ Eve, Stingy Jack was quenching his thirst at a pub when he ran out of money to pay his tab. The Devil, seeing an opportunity, suddenly appeared. But wily Jack managed to turn the tables and trap the Devil not once but twice. The price for the Devil’s release was that he would leave Jack alone and never ever lay claim to his soul. When he died, he was sentenced to roam the earth for eternity with nothing more than a lantern made from a carved-out turnip to light his way. Folks terrified by the prospect of the wandering soul that came to be known as Jack O’Lantern, began carving scary faces out of turnips, potatoes and mangelwurzels, placing them in windows or near entryways to scare him away. Irish immigrants brought the practice to America, the world’s eighth largest pumpkin grower, and soon every October called for us to start carving jack-o-lanterns out of this plump, orange, easily carve-able fruit. Pumpkins go hand in hand with Halloween and Thanksgiving, and both holidays draw near. It is the season of plenty — plenty of inflation in food, bond yields, fund outflows, bearishness and fear of missing out

The total amount of data in the world as of 2020 was estimated to be 44 zettabytes, or 44 trillion gigabytes, and every day since then we have created about 2.5 quintillion bytes more. So how do we handle this vast pool of information available to us, with more arriving constantly throughout the day and night? In order to be able to function amid all the information flow, we tend to create what some term a “web of belief”, a core logic, whether it is in fact logical or not. Many personal webs of belief have been completely altered during the pandemic. Those campaigning for public office count on many webs to be recast close to election day. It is happening again this year as voters have become laser focused on inflation, mortgage and interest rates, immigration, and crime, among other issues.

The Milky Way is vast: it may be one of trillions of galaxies in the universe, but it is about a thousand light years thick and stretching some 120,000 light years from end to end, holding every alien planet that our telescopes have ever spotted. To travel once around, it would take 250 million years. The Sun is based along one of its smaller arms about 26,000 light years from the turbulent core, which is packed with supermassive black holes. It has a thin, flat disk of gas and an unknown number of stars, some of which are believed to be 10 to 13 billion years old, in the middle. Near the edges, however, it appears rather sloppy, quite twisted and warped. In the financial markets these days, there is quite a lot that is warped, twisted and bubbly.

There is a form of writing going back to the 17th century known as a lipogram wherein a single letter, or a number of letters, are omitted from a work. The author’s challenge is to compose a poem, article or book without using the common letter ‘e’, for example — no easy task. In the case of this short market commentary, 889 instances of the vowel ‘e’ can be found. Imagine the difficulty involved in penning, say, a 50,000-word novel without a single use of that letter. These days we do not need to conjure up new challenges. We have plenty as it is just trying to get through a trading day without another loss, passing a gas station without seeing higher prices, coughing and wondering if we have the new COVID variant, turning on the TV without having a central banker tell us about the harsher dose of rate medicine we need to swallow for the next six months – or longer.