Investors are dissecting every utterance from the U.S. and China for signs of progress or imminent failure of phase one of a big trade deal.

The latest commentary from the Chinese side put hardly any emphasis on how close they are to a signing ceremony date. The two are talking and “China is willing to work with the U.S. to address each other’s core concerns and to create conditions for reaching a phase-one agreement,” Ministry of Commerce spokesman Gao Feng said yesterday.

White House economic adviser Larry Kudlow, speaking to reporters after an event late Thursday in Washington, injected a little more color and optimism on the timetable. He said the U.S. is communicating “every single day now” with their counterparts in Beijing. While it’s not a done deal yet, “we’re coming down to the short strokes,” he said.

The phrase “short strokes” has some interesting meanings going back to the 18th century, according to a 1987 column by William Safire, who also cited House testimony in which former U.S. Secretary of State George Shultz used the phrase to describe a stage in Cold War-era negotiations with the Soviet Union.

So let’s assume Kudlow was referring to the more modern inference of the phrase: a short stroke in golf — a chip shot to the green perhaps — or the most precise and nerve-wracking final strokes of a painter. Stock investors liked the sound of the proximity that Kudlow described, bidding up shares from Asia to Europe and pushing U.S. equity futures toward Wall Street’s longest weekly rally in more than two years.

It’s just the latest chapter in a 20-month-long saga that Bloomberg reporters Jenny Leonard and Shawn Donnan chronicled in the latest edition of Bloomberg Businessweek. What started as a surgical use of tariffs to slowly pressure China into reforms descended into a more unpredictable process that’s deepening uncertainty and chipping away at both economies.

If it all went smoothly, Presidents Donald Trump and Xi Jinping were supposed to be signing phase one this weekend at an Asia-Pacific leaders’ summit in Chile, until the conference was cancelled amid social unrest there. Kudlow seems relatively confident that the finishing touches are almost upon us.