Until three years ago, the news broadcasts on these days began with the carnival in Mainz and the carnival in Cologne and ended with pictures from Rio.
Everything has been different since then – especially today.
Actually, this post should be one of the moody variety, after all, the calendar for the coming days provides for the high festival of good mood, partying exuberance and at least one hangover.
I don't feel like it.
Sober objectivity is the order of the day.
The technical condition of the Dax, like that of many of its global counterparts, has been anything but good for months.
Now she's really bitter.
For around ten months it fluctuated between 15,000 and 16,000 points and could not decide whether to break out up or down.
This indecisiveness has been over since last Monday: the optimists have given up.
The pessimists have been at the helm since Monday at the latest.
The undercutting of the lower limit of its previous trading range can only be interpreted in this way.
The risk that the Dax has completed a medium-, perhaps even long-term top formation with prices below 15,000 points is high.
But that's not all: The Dax price index shown, the index that alone is comparable to the Dow Jones, for example, because it is exempt from dividends, has not only completed a top formation with its slide below the zone of 6300 to 6430 points.
It also fell back below the highs of 2000, 2015, 2017 and 2018.
Developments like these are fun-free: they are a textbook disaster.
With the breakout above these highs, the Dax price had created an excellent basis for significantly rising prices in April 2021 - but was unable to use it.
You don't see a "bull trap" of this quality very often.
But when they show up, you really have to pay close attention to them.
How will the future look like?
When it comes to the laws of probability, which are fundamentally the only relevant ones here, the answer must be: not so good.
Further discounts to the support zone between 5150 and 5300 points are well within the realm of possibility.
Roughly speaking, this corresponds to levels between 12,000 and 12,500 points on the Dax.
What remains is cautious optimism
But if I have my way, we're dealing with a bear trap.
Then everything would be fine again in a few weeks, the Dax would have recovered well and the crisis would be over to a certain extent.
Strictly analytically, wishes like this have the fatal quality of becoming reality in at best one of two cases.
Don't count on that.
In view of this chart, the question arises as to whether the advice given recently in a prominent place can be correct to be involved in the market "as uninterruptedly as possible".
The result of this "strategy", measured against the price index of the Dax for the past 22 years, has been significantly negative since yesterday at the latest and the "nervous balance" catastrophic.
Losses of 75 percent, as in the years 2000 to 2003, leave no one indifferent.
Despite everything, optimism remains the order of the day: At some point there will be good reasons and the chance not only to know about the great days, but also to celebrate them exuberantly, to turn night into day and to wake up in the late afternoon with a headache .
At some point everything will go back to the way it used to be - also for the Dax.
The author is the managing director of Staud Research GmbH.