The whole market is behaving as though it’s got an Activist shareholder.

In a sense it does.  More on that in a minute.

We track the effects of Activism on trading and investment behaviors both before it’s widely known and afterward. A hallmark of these event-driven scenarios is behavioral volatility. That is, one or more of the big four reasons investors and traders buy and sell stocks routinely fluctuates day-over-day by more than 10% in target companies.

(Aside: Traders and investors buy and sell stocks for their unique characteristics, when they have characteristics shared by others, to profit on price-differences, and to leverage or protect trades and portfolios. The market at root is just these four simple purposes.)

Event-driven stocks can override normal constraints such as Overbought conditions, high short volume, or bearish fundamentals.  In fact, short volume tends to fall for catalyst stocks because the cost of borrowing shares rises as more want to own rather than rent, and unpredictability of outcomes makes borrowing shares for trading riskier.

Currently in the broad market, shorting trails the 200-day average marketwide. The market has manifested both negative and overbought sentiment and has still risen.

And behavioral volatility is off the charts.

Almost never does the broad market show double-digit fluctuations in behavior because it’s a giant index smoothing out lumps. With quad-witching and quarterly index rebalances Dec 16, Asset Allocation ballooned 16.3% marketwide, signaling that indexes and ETFs are out of step with assets (and may be substituting).

Also on Dec 16, what we call Risk Management (protecting or leveraging trades and portfolios) jumped 12%. It’s expected because leverage with derivatives has been pandemic in markets, with Active Investment and Risk Management – a combination pointing to hedge funds – currently leading.

Here’s the thing. The combined increase for the two behaviors last Friday was an astonishing 28%.  Then on Dec 19 as the new series of marketwide derivatives issued, Fast Trading – profiting on price-differences – exploded, jumping 25%.

A 25% change for a stock trading $100 million of dollar-volume daily is a big deal. The stock market is about $300 billion of daily dollar-volume.

Picture a skyscraper beginning to sway.

Looking back, Risk Management jumped 16% with July expirations, the first after searing Brexit gains. The market fell from there to September expirations when again behavioral volatility exploded. The market recovered briefly before falling all the way to the election. With expirations Nov 18, Risk Management shot up 11.2%.

Behavioral volatility precedes price-volatility. We have it now, monumentally.

What’s happened in the broad market is a honeymoon before the wedding. The incoming Trump administration has sparked an investing surge betting on a catalyst – exactly the way Activist investors affect individual stocks.  Fundamentals cease to matter.  Supply and demand constraints go out the window. A fervor takes hold.

The one thing our long bull market has lacked is fervor. It’s the most hated – and now second longest ever – bull market for US stocks because so many have loathed the monetary intervention behind ballooning asset prices.

That’s all been forgotten and a sort of irrational exuberance has set in.

Those who know me know I embrace in libertarian fashion broad individual liberty and limited government because it’s the environment that promotes prosperity best for all. I favor a future with more of it.

We should get the foundation right though. I’ll use a metaphor.  Suppose a giant storm lashes a coast, burying it in sand. Some return to the beach to rebuild homes and establishments but much lies listlessly beneath a great grainy coat.

Then a champion arrives and urges people to build. The leader’s verve lights a fire in the breasts of the people, who commence building a vast structure.

Right on the sand.  Which lies there still unmoved, a shifting layer beneath the mighty edifice rising upon it.

It’s better to remove the sand – all the central-bank buildup from artificial prices, the manufactured money, the warped credit markets.  Otherwise when the next wave comes the damage will be that much greater.

So call me wary of this surge.