Everybody relax, Mike Wilson says it’s gonna be ok.

That’s sarcasm, obviously, but if you could somehow taste it — the sarcasm — you’d discover it’s a different flavor of snark than that I employed historically while editorializing around sell-side strategery notes.

I used to employ what I’ll call generic, “lite sarcasm.” You know, the type of good-natured snark that endears you to market contrarians and makes people think you’re smarter than you are, but doesn’t compel readers to exclaim, “Gosh, this guy’s actually an asshole! He doesn’t just play one on the internet.”

A couple of years ago, I got an email from a subscriber who complained that by not putting analysts’ names in titles anymore, I was making it difficult for this person to quickly locate coverage of Wall Street notes on the site. If it were up to that reader, every article would be “Mike Wilson Warns,” “Savita Subramanian Says” and “Marko Kolanovic Cautions.”

Ima let everybody in on a little secret: I hate writing those kind of articles. And always have. Pretending not to hate writing them was the only dishonest thing I’ve ever done on this platform. As Charlie Munger would attest — and in much harsher terms than even “new” me would venture — that stuff’s worse than useless. Everybody realizes that, right?

Wrong. The answer to that latter question is “wrong.” A lot of people think this stuff is a window into some secret world. I know I did a decade ago. I remember being utterly fascinated in 2015 when suddenly I had access to every sell-side strategy note on Earth through a Markit-branded aggregator called “Hub.”

I don’t know if Hub still exists, but it worked as follows. Let’s say you’re a buy-sider and you’ve paid millions of dollars for access to research from Wall Street banks, or maybe the research came packaged with your prime services. Rather than having to go into each of those banks’ individual research portals, you could set up a Hub account, Hub would verify your credentials with those banks and then you could access all the research through one portal. The buy-sider whose Hub credentials we had at ZeroHedge granted us access to more or less every bank’s research.

It took me — I don’t know — not long, that’s for sure, to come around to the reality of sell-side strategy notes. That research wasn’t the Holy Grail of anything other than monetizable web content, which is exactly how we treated it. We had a temporal edge on Bloomberg because whereas they had to wait on the banks to send out select notes to specific journalists, we had every note as soon as it was available to real clients. That’s how we “scooped” them (and the FT) on Wall Street research.

Long after I left, they took that monetization push to its illogical extreme, offering to sell the research itself through a Dropbox folder, which the ZeroHedge faithful would be able to buy access to. And listen: That’s public information. I don’t know if they ever actually went through with it, but true to absurdist form, they advertised it — the Dropbox folder — in their public-facing marketing pitch for a belated foray into paid subscriptions. As a man who appreciates ballsy money-making ventures, my first reaction to that was, “hats off.” But that quickly turned into “hats off for going there.” (“When I was playing the character.” “When you was the character.” “Yeah, yeah, I mean as Tyler.”)

So… yeah. Sell-side research. It’s useless. Which probably goes a ways towards explaining why it’s pretty much everywhere now. A decade ago, you needed to get it second-hand from three guys pretending to be anarchists (one of whom was a raging alcoholic), but these days you can just wander over to Stocktwits and get it from “WallStJesus” — assuming your computer doesn’t overheat from the stress of all the ads Howard Lindzon apparently needs to serve to keep the lights on. (Maybe he should partner up with WallStJesus on a sell-side Dropbox so he doesn’t have to rely so heavily on ad revenue.)

Now, back to Mike. On Monday, Wilson said that in his view, the stock correction “that began in June is now in the final innings.” (I know, I know: “Phew.” I was up all night too.)

The figure on the left, above, is highly technical and indicative of why these notes were, for so long, closely-guarded secrets. The yellow line is the equal-weighted S&P 500. The blue line is the cap-weighed index. The black dashed line is a box. The arrow’s an arrow.

Over there on the right is a sentiment indicator. It too isn’t amenable to simple explanation, but here goes: The lower it is, the worse is sentiment, and vice versa. As the chart header notes, the current reading is off the highs, but not extremely low, which suggests the swoon for risk is relatively far along, but “not quite there yet,” where “there” means finished.

The takeaway, from Wilson: Although a “final capitulatory event is possible… near-term clearing events [may] provide an attractive opportunity to add risk to quality cyclicals.” His year-end SPX price target is unchanged at 8000.

Now what’d you learn? From Wilson, I mean.