Bonjour, mon ami! Observant readers may have noticed this comment yesterday:

I probably don't need to bother showing you this, but………

As for equities, it occurs to me we can think of this year's price activity as a stop light. The topping action was up at the green light area, and that terminated late in January. We have had a couple of trips to the red light zone, which is where people get really scared and, at one point, the VIX almost reached 30. And now, sadly, we are back into the grind-it-out, everyone-is-frustrated yellow zone. As I've mentioned repeatedly the past few days, the base (that is, the second instance in the red light zone) is better-formed than the earlier one, so this push could be steadier and more resolute.