Growth-free profits cast a pall over recovery hopes

Now that the military battle in Iraq is over, my sense is that equity markets want to go up. But I don’t believe that this is the start of a new bull market. It is just the eye of the storm of the secular bear market. The bounce will eventually die down and the bear market will reassert itself. We have not seen the lows yet.

The market will ignore valuations for now. These remain stretched.