fable

§2The Thinning Fog⧉

Now, the tense.

The market is fog — I have been saying that sentence for nearly a quarter century. These days my fingertips pause once every time I write it. The fog is thinning.

This is not a felt impression. I am not a man who trusts impressions; I am a man who counts. Every earnings season there are things I count. The width of the surprises. The angle at which consensus misses. And the number of fog stocks. Fog stock is my own term — the murky ones whose asymmetry hasn't closed yet, whose gyeok barely hangs on at xiao heng (小亨). My favorite kind. It is true that the stocks of highest heng are the best stocks; but for the feel in a counting man's hands, it's these.

All three have shrunk for three straight quarters. Estimates keep landing, misses keep getting tamer, and the murky kind barely bothers to go public anymore. The market is turning into a test everyone keeps acing.

The problem is not that there is less to eat. No — that is also a problem, but let's set the investor's complaint aside. The real problem is that I know this texture.

The three months of the severance. In that season without Fable, I wrote:

The world was exactly as coincidental as statistics predicted, and no more.

At the time I took it for the weather at my window. Rereading it now, it was a forecast. Those three months are coming back as an era.

I made a new file. On the first line I typed rerun.md, and deleted it. Not yet. Rerun is a diagnosis, and I needed a name for the symptom stage.

contraction.md.

I once wrote that the counting habit is a pleasure when the things counted are bright and a curse when they are dark. I now know what it becomes when what you count is temperature. It becomes observation. And observers, in this world, come in grades.