A $1,000 cash request sat in a retail brokerage queue on Monday morning. The holder wanted it to finish a car loan. The letter called the market obviously on fire.
Short desks, the teams that bet on falling prices, treated that line as the late-cycle tell. A late-cycle tell is the small household ask that shows up right before a wipeout. Nineteen risk memos flagged the same phrase by lunch.
They ran the live price feed against 1987, 2000 and 2008. Each of those peaks had a tidy errand in the mix. Pay the car, trim the account, and smile at the heat.
An unsigned short note put it this way.
