I usually don’t post about music, and talk about artists I like or dislike, and I’m not going to here.  I do, however, like to relate similar concepts that I understand to things that are difficult to grasp. As I can see it, right now the markets are in a period of dissonance.

If you’ve never heard this term before, its a simple explanation. Listen to some Jazz music, and you will hear all kinds of notes that sound terrible. Like they don’t relate to the notes that were played before. This is dissonance in a nutshell. It’s always been the hardest thing for me to grasp when listening to jazz. It always sounds like they are playing the wrong notes. I mean how hard is that for me to play the wrong notes on MY guitar? I would be an AWESOME jazz artist.

However, it’s also what makes up the genius of some of these artists. Some are able to take these unrelated dissonant tones and create beautiful pieces that are cohesive when listened to as a whole. Therein lies the analogy with the market. In a period of dissonance where things are “unstable”, you need to search harder for options and look deeper for trends that are making sense (called consonance in music). Their tough to find with oil dominating the world as it is, but I assure you this trend will slow or lesson at some point. The market will demand it with exponential increases.

So this is what I’m looking for in the market right now, a small sense of stability that a trend may be building in. But remember, there are tons of companies (notes) that are sounding terrible right now, and the market as a whole is like a bad jazz artist. Search out the Coltrane’s and the Miles Davis’s and you might get rewarded in the long term.