Last week there seemed to be quite a lot of bearish sounding calls with markets at highs. To me everything seemed quite healthy and I wrote up this piece. PS, we can even add the very respected Mohamed El-Erian who called for a 10% drop on 3/24! Remains to be seen but so far that is going the wrong way.

Now, the VIJ6 16.85 did trigger and that worked really well for a 1 day hedge as suggested with an exit the next day. But rather than sell stocks I thought best to have a few very brief defensive plays (also TLT long, XLF short, FXI short if in EEM long) against a mostly long book (DIA, SOXX, GLD/GDX, small oil related remaining, EEM) and then see what happened.

Also from 3/22: "If stocks are green on the year as more and more are this will put pressure on the fund managers to buy. I am not necessarily saying jump in and buy today, as anyone following along got decently long from the end of February through 3/10-11 after having starter longs on 2/12. But right now holding longs, and being careful ie not so eager with shorts or hedges, is proving the right approach."

And that is how it has played out folks. What I didn't peg was how SPY going green would trigger large short covering on IWM, that would have been nice.