After years of steadily upward grinding markets, we have suddenly seen three stock market shakeouts of more than 10% over the past six months.

The Volatility Index (VIX) has spiked over $50 once and $30 on three separate occasions during the same time period.

What gives?

Is the bull market over? Is it time to don your hard hat and hide out in a bunker? Should we start stockpiling canned food, water, and ammo once again?

Hardly.

Those of us who have been around for a handful of decades have seen all this before. After several years, markets just get tired of going up.

Traders look at their S&P 500 (SPX) charts and think, “holy moly, the index has just tripled off its $667 bottom! SELL!”

Investors look at their charts and think “Wow, markets have been going up for seven years now! Isn’t this where a recession usually kicks in? SELL!”

In fact, markets can go down for no other reason than they have been going up for too long, earnings be damned. The bear market becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

The problem is that these days, high frequency traders, complex derivatives enabling massive leverage, the rise of ETF’s, the disappearance of intermediaries, and scaredy cat day traders put a turbocharger on every single move.

However, this year we seem to have more than the usual numbers of things to worry about.

I will list them in order of importance. Caution: you may not have heard of several of these.

1) The retirement of 85 million baby boomers is still the biggest drag on risk assets everywhere. Retirement brings a shift in investment preferences away from equities and towards fixed income, and a major downsizing of consumption. They are a huge drag on the economy. This will continue for six more years.

2) The Federal Reserve’s monetary policy of quantitative easing gave us all free money to buy everything, especially stocks. Since it ended in October, 2014 stocks have flat lined within a broad range. Expect this to continue until the next real recession, which could be years off.