The Ignorant Investor

As I was reading today's entries at Barry Ritholtz's market-oriented blog, The Big Picture, the following paragraphs caught my eye:

The DOW has made higher lows and is now in the process of pulling back to its trend line. This is consistent with a minor retracement from modestly overbought levels.

Note that if Traders get a sense that the Fed may not pause, or figures out that Oil still remains pricey, we may see more giveback of the rally.

Ritholtz is a Wall Street market strategist, and I don't have a beef with what he writes. But these lines struck me illustrative of that language known as "marketspeak," the often needlessly opaque argot of the international brotherhood of traders. I'm not a member of that club, but I will attempt a translation into the language of the ignorant investor here:

Traders have been optimistic enough lately to push stock prices higher than they probably should be, and if they start thinking the Federal Reserve won't pause in raising short term rates or that oil prices are going to stay high, they're going to turn skittish and start selling off some of their positions, dropping us back down to where we started a few months ago.

Sounds like a reasonable prognosis to me, assuming I didn't misunderstand him. It's not information that helps someone who isn't trading the the short term, but it isn't it always nice to try to reading a foreign language?