Smoking a j and following the stock market can actually be a nice way to spend part of a day. The action in financial markets around the world has been of particular interest lately. It's almost like what sports are supposed to be: entertaining, gripping, providing a basis by which to root.

There's so much going on in the world today that the stock and bond markets do a pretty good job of filtering, illustrating, translating, transcribing. There's AI. There's the concentration of so much wealth the hands of a small group of individuals. There's inflation, there's geopolitical turmoil, there's politics, there's an election less than two weeks away.

There's that Talking Heads song, "Flippy Floppy." One day the AI trade is on, the next day those stocks are getting slammed. These have been some big swings. This is volatility that the VIX doesn't seem to register. If you're in this trade, the five percent you lost today is worth more than the five percent you made yesterday—do the math. ($100 x 1.05 =$105.00; .95 x $105=$99.75). Ride those waves day in, day out and you are not going to make any money.

I like to look instead at what stocks are up on a day like today. (I am my father's son.) What is interesting about the green on the screen today is that you don't have to go into the weeds to find the winners. Bonds are up (interest rates are down). Who saw Treasury Bills as one of October's best trades? Predicting the future is a fickle business.

But it's not just bonds that are up today (note: this is as of the last hour of the trading day, 14:26 CDT...) How about the exchange traded fund RSP? Up almost half a percent. That's the Equal-Weighted S&P 500, meaning the fund holds 500 stocks with each stock comprising 1/500th of the total portfolio. (As opposed to the "regular" S&P 500 which is cap-weighted, meaning its biggest constituents have the largest impact on the price of the index.). The regular S&P 500 is off by 1.3% as of 14:29. The Nasdaq? Down 2.63%...

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