Humans have a persistent, predictable bias: we overweight outcomes we can see and underweight outcomes we can’t. The reason is obvious: immediate, visible consequences feel real, while distant, abstract consequences do not.
That is why people still smoke, eat badly, skip exercise, and ignore slow-building risks in general. They may “know” there are consequences in some abstract sense, but without immediate feedback, those consequences are easy to discount.
This bias also helps explain why politics is so dysfunctional. Many serious problems develop slowly, remain mostly invisible until late in the game, and impose no obvious pain in the present.
Social Security is one example: we’ve known for decades that its finances are structurally strained, yet meaningful reform keeps getting deferred because the problem still feels distant to most people. Most likely, because of our cognitive bias, nothing will be done until the 11th hour.
Imagine these two scenarios:
In the first, you walk into your bedroom, see a bomb, call the bomb squad, and they disarm it. You’re incredibly grateful.
In the second, armed men kick in your door at 1 a.m., drag your family out of the house, terrify your children, damage your property, and leave without explanation. You’re furious.
You carry a grudge against these men for years. Until one day, you finally learn the truth: There was a bomb under your bed and they saved your family.
That is the problem with prevention: when the danger is invisible but the intervention is visible, people often resent the rescue. Preventing a disaster no one saw and that never happened rarely earns gratitude. Worse, if the preventive action is disruptive enough, it can even make the rescuer look like the villain.
Which means there's an asymmetrical social and political payoff for waiting until things are dire.
Politicians are rewarded for managing visible pain and punished for imposing visible costs to prevent abstract future pain.
For that reason, politicians are incentivized not merely to ignore future problems, but to avoid taking painful, visible action against risks the public still experiences as abstract.
So it’s always worth considering what kind of political behavior we, the electorate, are actually rewarding. If we punish prevention and reward delayed reaction, then we should stop acting surprised when politicians wait until after the fire's already raging.
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Market wise, bulls obviously aren't entirely out of the woods yet, but it's looking increasingly likely that wave C of the expanded flat we've been tracking since December 8, 2025 has indeed bottomed.
There's another option not discussed on that chart, which would be that the last bottom was a larger B-wave -- which would see a rally back to the all-time high and then yet another return to recent lows. I'll cover that in more detail if it becomes appropriate, but there's the head's up.
COMPQ is likely going to shoot back above its resistance zones at the open. Bulls will, of course, need to sustain that breakout:
Finally, I hinted at this possibility in oil in the prior update, but I think I've talked myself into very slightly favoring it. The last low has been bothering me, because it just doesn't look like any sort of C-wave -- it's looks corrective, like the b-wave I've labeled below. This would mean the spike wave wave c of an expanded flat to complete the larger b-wave. Note that this count, if correct, could indicate another year (or even many years, if the blue abc is just wave A of an even larger flat!) of low oil prices. So I thought it was worth warning about this now:
In conclusion, bulls are doing what they needed to do and the C-wave low is looking more likely. Bears do still have a couple of "last lines of defense," but they'll need to make a convincing and fairly immediate stand to undo the damage they're going to take at the open. Trade safe.
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