I agree, @Brumbie. We have established the kind of freedom that required struggle and guardianship. This is as old as Plato’s Republic. But as with the characters in that dialogue, we are still far from understanding the untethered elements that would maximize a broader freedom of will. While the wealth disparity in the world is quite shocking, not everyone thinks that dumping money on problems can solve them. Human effort and understanding, however, might. Once given the luxury of freedom from despotism and theocracy - to think and believe as individuals - we have only our own souls to contend with. And that is where we now find ourselves in the free world. We are essentially free agents who quite naturally spend much of our time concerned with our own problems. Here we spend billions on our football, and that is part of capitalism and what the market will bear; but as we see the more and more energy being put into such things, one can imagine what would happen if we parlayed such enormous resources toward helping receptive institutions in the developing world. Don’t get me wrong; people need their relaxation. As in ancient Rome and Athens, they need their pretend villains, heroes and allegorical facsimiles of life itself. But the point I would make is that capitalism and freedom is the result of suasion. What we do with it is ultimately the result of our moral free will.
And speaking of free will, I think the late Friday S&P futures action was anything but.
SPY and ES volume/price/time structure from Friday looks suspicious to me. Post 273/14:45 EST action was poor and fragmented, which means that machines were forcing shorts to cover. It does not seem like genuine buying interest, but it could be a means of generating just that. The first four hours of Friday’s action contains similar value density to the prior 3 sessions, but the final hour after price left ES value area high and SPX crossed through 2730 seems contrived. It looks like late-day shenanigans for the sake of the 50 day, call interest or whatever other reasons we will likely come across this weekend. It will be interesting to see if they can force this through to 2770 next week. Still trying to work out the profile on NQH8 Nasdaq futures, which looked frothy but not quite as forced.
(20min delay)