It's a shabby business of late, the inability of the gold price to raise its sleepy head when everyone knows it should be dancing the fandango. (Okay, on Friday it rose, like, 1%, but, like, duh.)
For a long-term investor there is no sweeter sight than the chart of Shoprite from 2002 to date: a gorgeous climbing trend that shows disdain for trifling global financial crises.
It is pretty rare to hear quantum mechanics evoked to describe the global economy, but hey - these are strange and dangerous times.
Richard Stovin-Bradford, for many years a larger-than-life character in these rooms and a stout defender of the banking industry, would have gone right off his feed.
NOBODY likes it, but we are sliding down the plughole to a dystopian world where the normal rules of the market no longer apply.
Oh, for heaven's sake. It is not right that a person as lissome, as prescient, as sweet a putter as I, should fail to predict the &%$#@!* prices, eight months in advance, of five stupid instruments quoted on the JSE.
Warren Buffett has always said he'd never invest in a company he didn't understand - a strategy we all agree has stood him in pretty good stead.
Australia operates as a kind of super-warrant on the performance of its main benefactor, China - and so too do South Africa's fortunes swing on the health of the world's second-biggest economy.
The chortle of the week comes courtesy of the International Swaps and Derivatives Association, a cabal of chums determined not to share their bag of plums.
It is a measure of how weird the world's become when someone as out-there as Ron Paul can command the loyalty of millions.
Yes, we all know never to assume past performance has any bearing on future returns, but still - the latest Morningstar unit trust rankings make for irresistible speculation.
On thursday night I re-read part two, the Greek bit, of Michael Lewis's Boomerang, a bitterly amusing chronicle of the collapse of old Europe. The original piece was published in Vanity Fair in October 2010. Given the long deadlines on glossy magazines, and the months Lewis must have spent researching the story, the account I read was nearly two years old.
Sometimes fund managers say the darndest things. One of the best is that there are vast pools of cash "on the sidelines" just itching to flood into the stock market.
What does "Bric" really stand for? No, no - not Brazil-Russia-India-China, as intended by the bloke who coined the acronym, Jim O'Neill of Goldman Sachs, Wall Street's biggest bank by assets.
What are the chances that a fund damager will get a big, fat macro bet right twice in a row? Particularly if said master of the universe is rather bearish and the rest of the world is, er, somewhat bearish, too?
There are several delightfully destructive scenarios being sketched by pundits as the Western world (and Japan) slouches its way to oblivion.
If nothing else cheers you up this week, take a long, loving look at the price of gold. In November 2001 it was $272.10/oz and this month it hit $1900.30/oz.
So the endgame in the tragicomedy goes like this: Italy-France-Spain-Germany-bang. Then Britain and the US.
Just how nasty will the damage be when the fall of Greece triggers all kinds of derivative-based insurance agreements?
Had to chortle at the quick about-face shown by the Wall Street Journal website marketwatch.com in the wee hours of the European dawn on Thursday.
Forget the elephant, there is a great big bear in the room - and in the china shop, for that matter. There in the shadows, while Sarkozy and Merkel try their best to tune them out, the bears are primed and ready to crash the debt-market party.
Jaundiced is too charming a word to describe the way many punters are feeling about the state of the world.
Not sure whether to feel good or bad about this, but living the high life in Italy doesn't cost a whole lot more than schlepping through your average Joburg week.
Had to chuckle about the UBS "rogue trader" debacle this week. A colleague asked the wicked question: why is the trader called a rogue only because he lost a whole lot of money? What about all his winning trades that were undoubtedly made using exactly the same slightly dubious methods?
Dutch disease normally afflicts countries that have a stroke of outrageous good fortune - such as discovering vast new oil reserves - but SA may be suffering the early stages of the illness right now.
The tragic decline we see play out daily in the fiscal state of the US doesn't necessarily mean we have to give up hope for that country's listed companies.
Compare page 10 of this edition with page 15 and tell me there isn't something weird going down in the wonderful world of stocks.
Global flight to safety? Here, okes, right here! You want bladdy safety, we got safety. We're safe, my chinas.
So this was the month the black swans came home to roost, with much clucking and squawking and many a feather ruffled.
It's the end of the world ... er, hang on a minute. Hold your fire, doomers, there's more to this bear market lark than meets the eye.
YOU don't have to be a Democrat to feel repelled by the charades being played on the floor of the US Congress.
Now here's a lovely conspiracy theory, which explains everything you need to know about the two-year-long bull run in US stocks.
Nice to see news this week that another "value" manager, this time Investec's John Biccard, is dipping a toe into the inviting bog of gold stocks.
And now for the good news - which will no doubt bore the pants off pessimists who persist in calling for the rand to fall through a hole in the floor.
IF you are as baffled as the best of us about market movements, maybe it's time we all revisited some basic truths. As many a bruised value-manager can attest, fundamental valuations appear to have gone out the window.
