What is painful about so much market commentary is that it is focused on price. The Dow went up, huzzah! The dollar fell, huzzah?!

But prices are nothing without time. And most prices are meaningless. The only ones that truly matter are the ones we know definitively for any given period of time — Open, High, Low, Close.

Everything else is noise and errata.

So, the calendar shifting from September to October creates another opportunity to aggregate all the noise of two different time periods, one month and one quarter-year, and assess what people actually thought of the Dow or the dollar or Tesla or a micro-cap furniture company in Saigon.

Given the extreme political landscape, central bankers who have no answers and the obvious push for a remaking of society through the fear-mongering over COVID-19 this quarterly close may be one of the most important in the history of financial markets.