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Confounding a whole slew of otherwise smart people running literally trillions of dollars in hedge and pension funds, the US stock market, as measured by total return of the S&P 500, finished in spectacular fashion in 2023 while posting an annual gain of 27% (including both dividends and price appreciation.)

In the wake of this seeming inexplicable Biden Bull, the passive investor, buy and hold crowd crowed that anybody who “plays the market” is a fool; and the only thing for us retail investors to do is just buy and hold broad market indices for years on end and just let your broker worry about it.

Fair enough – if you just look at the results of this year.  But perhaps not so smart if you take a little bit of time to unravel the mystery of just what bus hit so many in the hedge fund crowd who took massive, often times leveraged, shorts of the S&P 500.

So let me take a crack at trying to unravel that mystery for you – which you will see turns out to be no mystery at all.

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