We’ve seen a lot of the usual hand-wringing about U.S. markets over the past several months—Flash Boys and high-frequency trading, breakdowns in the Nasdaq, various insider trading scandals. It hasn’t been a great time to be in the financial market press-relations departments.

Today’s post is inspired by Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji, a series of woodblock prints by the Japanese artist Hokusai that depicts the same scene from various perspectives, yielding very different images. Data can be viewed the same way, with various angles giving different impressions and potentially leading to very distinct conclusions.

The headline for this morning is that new home sales are down more than 14 percent on a month-to-month basis. This comes in tandem with drops in mortgage applications and a much smaller drop, of less than 1 percent, in existing home sales. With rates up, and demand potentially declining as institutional buyers pull back, is it time to worry that the housing recovery is over?

I’m headed back from a brief vacation today. My family and I were at the Commonwealth Winners Circle conference, then ventured down south of Tucson to stay with Jackson’s Gram and Pop-pop. It’s been a fun couple of days—I particularly recommend the Desert Museum—but today will be spent on planes. That’s the plan.

Signs of Concern for the Stock Market

As I start to put together my commentary for the month of March, one thing that’s become apparent is that the market has weakened significantly. In February, we saw a dip at the start and then a strong recovery, but this month we’re pretty much flat, which conceals several significant ups and downs.

This will be a short post as I’m on my way to Commonwealth’s Chairman’s Retreat, an annual conference with an amazing lineup of speakers (and me), along with a fantastic location (this year, Las Vegas) and events. I look forward to it every year, and this one promises to be just as good as expected.

Browsing the papers this morning, I had one clear thought: do we really live in a free market? New Jersey has decided that Tesla cannot sell its cars there directly; it has to go through existing dealers. Talk about a government-protected business! This is a pretty blatant example, but it hit me right between the eyes (and prepped me for the next couple of points).

Check out Brad’s recent interviews on Fox Business Network:

What will drive the markets higher, Thursday, March 6

Over the weekend, as you no doubt have heard, Russia reportedly executed a military takeover of the Crimea region of Ukraine in response to last week’s pro-Western revolution. Markets are reacting this morning to the immediate fact of Russia’s action. As investors, we need to think about the context and likely outcome of the immediate situation before we respond.

First, let’s consider whether this is a short- or long-term action. For all the talk of bringing pressure on Russia to reverse the situation, the reality is that the West’s ability to exert any kind of meaningful pressure is limited or nonexistent. Without actually committing military force, we cannot effect change. Europe depends on Russian natural gas to heat its homes and operate its economy; Russia remains a major oil supplier to world markets. It’s impossible to cut Russia off economically, since Europe and world markets depend on it too greatly. From a military perspective, it’s the area’s strongest power. There’s no clear course of action for the West.

There is a real asymmetry about how we treat market ups and downs. In the past couple of weeks, when the market dropped around 1 percent, I got phone calls from advisors and reporters asking why. How could this happen? Today, when the market is up about 1 percent, no calls at all. According to the Wall Street Journal, we are back at record highs, have erased all the losses so far in 2014, and all is right with the world.