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Herb Greenberg

Thoughts on this ‘Throw-A-Dart’ Market

It’s Christmas in September for the elves as ‘the worst ones are starting to work.’
September 12, 2025
Mr. Muggs the Chimp picks stocks
Trader with the magic touch, Mr. Muggs, who made millions trading this market

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▶It’s okay to say you don’t know what’s going to happen to this market because... nobody does... It doesn’t take a genius to know that the market’s action lately, but especially this week, is not normal. Oracle $ORCL will likely go down as the poster child for that, with its 35% gain in a single day, which as you’ve surely heard by now, is highly unusual for a company that big. As I wrote on social media the other day, “You just get a feeling that we’re in one of those ‘moments.’ Then again, I’ve been feeling like we’re in one of those ‘moments’ for at least six months,” a time period I pulled out of thin air because of the lunacy of it all.

Ken Brown, writing in The Information, on the day of Oracle’s big rise, was more precise: “Years from now,” he wrote, “today may be remembered as the moment of peak euphoria for artificial intelligence.“ Ken went on to write that while AI is being adopted quickly, what we saw on Thursday “defies logic.” Of course it does, but as the old saying goes – in reference to anybody who dares bet against markets like this: the markets can remain irrational longer than anybody betting against it can remain solvent.

The technicians, meanwhile, just go with the flow and right now the flow is with the mo, which is off whatever charts exist. Or as a friend who used to run a tech fund in the old days put it, “I have never seen anything like this, even in the peak of dot-COM insanity. At least back then, companies were blowing out revenue and earnings to the upside.” Referring to Oracle, he added, “This one, they actually missed on revenue and earnings.” 

Not that it matters...  certainly not right now. Certainly not if rates go lower and risk-averse savers are pushed back to what happened in the peak of 2021’s looniness when the only way they could make money was to take risk as they kept hearing that everybody’s kid was becoming a kajillionaire with crypto. Or the latest SPAC. Or whatever was the latest FOMO YOLO du jour. Last time it was Gamestop. This time... Opendoor? Its stock has surged thanks to the so-called “the Open Army” of retail investors who buy because... it’s what the crowd does. (You can’t make this stuff up.)

If you want a real indication of where we are, it’s what Steve Strazza of All Star Charts said on an internal call with his analyst in the heat of the week: “The worst ones of the world are starting to work... and in this tape you want the worst ones.” By “the worst ones” he was referring to what technical analysts call “breadth expansion.” Or in plain English: “They are buying everything. So buying lows is actually working better than buying highs. For traders. And that tends to happen in later innings of bull cycles. He went on to call this a “throw-a-dart market.”

That’s the point: While you or I may think what they’re doing is a fool’s game, so is trying to apply logic to the illogical. What you’re doing if you’re doing that is overthinking the unthinkable. Right now it’s a market made for technicians, chartists or as the late markets commentator Louis Rukeyser used to call them a very long time ago, kids – the elves. For them, this is Christmas. In September. Break out the eggnog. Drink up. Be Merry, because no matter how you try to rationalize it, this “trade” is on until it isn’t, and when it ends – as always – nobody will have seen it coming. Respect the Risk.

DISCLAIMER: This is solely my opinion based on my observations and interpretations of events, based on published facts and filings, and should not be construed as personal investment advice. (Because it isn’t!) I don't own any stock mentioned in this report.

Feel free to contact me at herb@herbgreenberg.com

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