To be clear, you don’t ever want to count out the dip-buyers.

After all, this is a market that’s been governed by a self-fulfilling prophecy – an ever more efficient dynamic that optimizes around itself precisely because it has to – for years. Recall how we described this earlier this week in a piece about fragility events:

The increasing rapidity with which intermittent flareups collapse has been a defining feature of markets over the past couple of years and this dynamic has become especially prevalent since Brexit.

Part and parcel of that dynamic is the idea that the central bank put has become self-sustaining – it runs on autopilot. Why wait on dovish forward guidance (or any other signal from the monetary gods) to buy the dip when you know with absolute certainty that in the unlikely event a drawdown proves to be some semblance of sustainable, policymakers will calm markets? If you know it’s coming, well then you should buy the dip now. This becomes a recursive exercise as everyone tries to frontrun everyone else and before you know it, dips and vol. spikes are mean reverting at a record pace as the prevailing dynamic optimizes around itself.

Of course that’s been thrown into question of late and in addition to Trump’s shrill tweets on trade (and on the “dieing” “Alex” Baldwin), traders woke up on Friday to news that Kuroda – the mainstay of mainstays when it comes to accommodation – mentioned the word “exit” in the context of stimulus today.

That, against a backdrop where Jerome Powell clearly hasn’t mastered the art of ensuring the two-way communication loop between markets and the Fed continues to function as it “should” (relationships are hard Jay, especially reflexive ones).

So maybe this isn’t the time to try and explain away events that are just plain old ominous. As we put it on Thursday, “eventually, dumb shit is recognized for what it is,” and what’s going on with trade definitely falls into the “dumb shit” category.