Look, I’m a simple man.

Not really. I’m actually so complicated that even I don’t understand myself on most days.

But when it comes to my personal investments, at least, I don’t overthink it. As I put it earlier this week, in response to a commenter who wondered if the pullback in US equities is a dip worth buying,

Generally speaking, a long-horizon, balanced portfolio is adding low-cost US equity index exposure once a selloff gets beyond, say, 7%. Not investment advice, but you want to dollar-cost average every month, and put in a little extra when things go south. Or at least in your core portfolio.

Wall Street, including some of the strategists I regularly cite, might dispute that or at least suggest it’s so simplistic that it might’ve walked out of a Jack Bogle book.

Well, guess what? It did walk out of a Jack Bogle book, it is simplistic and anyone who suggests it’s not the best strategy for most people is too smart for their own financial well-being, trying to sell you something and in most cases, both.

But if you view stocks as poker chips, investing as a game or you’re an adrenaline junkie, the Bogle strategy surely feels profoundly unsatisfying. And if you’re an active manager, Bogle’s nails on a chalkboard for obvious reasons: The implication is that you’re a charlatan on honest days and a thief on the other days, because your paid services are worse than useless.

We know what the dollar-cost average, buy-and-hold crowd did this week and last: They added some stock exposure, which they’ll hold until they die, almost surely richer than people who adopted a different strategy over the course of their investing careers. But what about the traders and the PMs? What have they been up to, and how are they feeling?

Squirrelly, is the answer to that latter question. “A theme that remains constant through the universe of folks I’m speaking with (particularly Macro) is that these remain ‘tradeable’ / ‘tactical’ rallies’ in equities,” Nomura’s Charlie McElligott said Wednesday, describing client conversations. “Rentals, not a ‘dip buy’ to then hold long-term.”

Why not? Why not buy an index of the best corporate America has to offer at an ~8% discount from record highs and then hold that stake in perpetuity, collecting dividends along the way to what, over a decade or more, will almost surely be meaningful capital appreciation?

PMs are glad you asked. “Many” who spoke to Charlie say they “want to sell rips because the market still doesn’t quite have its arms around the growth drag of this potent policy mix,” where “potent policy mix” presumably means the mix of mass federal layoffs, hourly tariff escalations and the vagaries of US territorial conquest, netted against tax cut extensions and deregulation.

Getting one’s “arms around” the “Trump 2.0” agenda and the ramifications for the macro environment and markets would be hard enough without having to factor in what McElligott aptly described as a reckoning for the mega-cap leadership, which is grappling with a “valuation / earnings reset,” imperiling the foundation of the multi-year US equities “exceptionalism” trade.

Now, look: It’s tempting to ask “Why try?” That is: Why would anyone endeavor the impossible? Why wittingly put yourself through the mental anguish associated with gambling on something so indeterminate in the short-term, particularly when a long-term bet placed on the very same assets is as close to a sure thing as you’re going to get in life?

I don’t know the answer to that, frankly. You’d have to ask a PM. I’ve gambled my life, my freedom and in a lot of cases, both at the same time, to turn, say, $10,000 into $50,000, and even I’m not crazy enough to believe I can successfully trade in and out of modern markets on a daily basis during what might fairly be described as the most delicate domestic- and geo-political juncture in modern American history.

Anyway, coming quickly back to Charlie, he said PMs believe we might’ve seen “a bottom, but not the bottom.” (Phil Connors was a god, not the God.)

He (Charlie, not Phil) went on to reiterate that some market participants — and this, I think, is actually worth considering, all sarcasm aside — are operating on a “simple framework” which says you’re long “fiscal expansionsists and easers,” which right now means Europe and China, and short “fiscal contractors,” which in the current context means the US.