And Just Like That ... Bears Are Toast! (For Now).

Last updated on Apr 8, 2026

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Market On Open, Wednesday 8 April

by Alex King, CEO, Cestrian Capital Research, Inc.

Investing, as everyone knows, is difficult. It’s always difficult. Right now people will tell you it’s difficult because it’s a tweet-driven market. Previously it was difficult because it was a Fed-driven market. And before that it was difficult because it was a pandemic-driven market. And before that - I forget, I’m too tired of permacrisis thinking to remember.

Markets themselves are always in permacrisis. Markets love permacrisis. For the very simple reason that those who make the market - not BlackRock, not Chad P. Retail, not J.R. Retiree, no, here I mean Citadel, Jane Street and co, those whose primary business is making money from the bid/ask spread and the volume of trades - market makers love a crisis because that way the good money comes pouring in, whether the market is looking to the sunny uplands ahead or staring straight at the Gates of the Underworld. In securities markets, crisis is a feature, not a bug. It’s why markets always over-react to the downside at the whiff of trouble, and to the upside at a spark of joy.

How To Deal With A Market In Crisis

There are two ways to deal with the market, which even in basic S&P500 form has the personality of a peptide-infused bipolar autist.

The first is to adopt the Warren Buffett method (the method he says you should do - not the method he does!) and just dollar-cost-average your way into a low cost S&P500 tracker fund over a lifetime, and never sell. I don’t know what you are supposed to do with this money by the way, since Mr. Buffett’s view is both (i) never sell and also (ii) don’t give any to your kids or anyone else. So this is, what, a kind of Lutheran deferred-gratification scheme whether the deferral is all the way out to perpetuity? Or what?

The second is to find methods to time the market. Buy low sell high, all that. You have a wall of financial media and folk narrative telling you it can’t be done. But it can be done. You can do it old style with stock charts, always remembering to elimate all feeling and emotion and opinion before you kneel at the friezes of Mammon. Or you can do it new style with an algorithm. Previously the domain of $100MM/yr teams of quantitative analysts, you can now get Claude to write and operate a trading algo for you for something less than $100/mo. As you hear me say often, the Internet deflates every guild it touches, and the Masters of the Universe are no exception. Now, your Claude algo won’t be very good of course, because like everything in AI, the skill is in coaxing and cajoling these wonderful new tools to leverage something at which you already excel. You can use Claude to become an averagely good painter if you like, but it can’t help you become Michaelangelo. It also won’t turn your mathmo meddlings into Jim Simons.

What you need in the midst of this permacrisis is quantitative expertise which uses LLMs to achieve far more than could be done without them. Our SignalFlow AI family of algorithms are just that. If you missed it, read this:

Remember: Algorithms Trade As Cold As Ice

Amongst the many plaudits we can and should give to the SignalFlow AI family is this: on Monday at the close - yes Monday, not Tuesday, Monday - our SignalFlow AI Growth algo flipped from risk-off (it had suggested its members sit in cash for a little while) to fully, unbridled, high-octane, risk on. Yes, on Monday at the close when your average stock picker was Claude-ing “what is the blast radius of a tactical nuclear weapon? and which state should I move to? - make no mistakes”. SignalFlow AI Growth proposed moving to long $SMH (semiconductor), long $XLK (Big Tech, eat that haters!) and long $GDX (gold miners). Well, reader, here’s how that has gone so far, just a day and a half later.

All these charts show the gains from Monday at 4pm Eastern to Wednesday at 6.30am Eastern.

$SMH +6.6%

$GDX +7.5%

$XLK +5.0%

If you’d like to learn more about this super-easy-to-use algorithm, created by a Ph.D with 35+ yrs of quantitative model building across fields as diverse as medical imaging, robotics and radar (Claude doesn’t have these chops by the way), then take a look here. Personally I trade this algorithm mechanically. It runs a lot colder than I do, it doesn’t know about fizzle yields and it doesn’t have its opinions changed whenever it goes to refuel the SUV.

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