"If I speak with the words of men and of angels,
but do not have love, I am a resounding gong or a clashing cymbal. And if I have the gift of prophecy and comprehend all mysteries and all knowledge; if I have the faith to move mountains but do not have love, I am nothing. If I give away everything that I have, and if I hand myself over for sacrifice but do not have love, I gain nothing.
Love is patient, love is kind.
Love does not envy,
is not boastful, is not conceited,
does not act improperly,
is not selfish, is not provoked,
and does not keep a record of wrongs.
Love finds no joy in wickedness
but rejoices in the truth."
1 Corinthians 13:1-7
"Then it will be God without disguise; something so overwhelming that it will strike either irresistible love or irresistible horror into every creature. It will be too late then to choose your side. That will not be the time for choosing: it will be the time when we discover which side we really have chosen, whether we realised it before or not."
C. S. Lewis, 1944
"Those among the rich who are not, in the rigorous sense, damned, can understand poverty, because they are poor themselves, after a fashion; they cannot understand destitution. They will be moved, to the sound of beautiful music, at Jesus’s sufferings, but His Cross, the reality of His Cross, will horrify them. They want it all out of gold, bathed in light, costly and of little weight; pleasant to see, hanging from a woman’s beautiful throat."
Léon Bloy
"A true opium of the people is the belief in nothingness after death, the huge solace, the huge comfort of thinking that for our betrayals, our greed, our cowardice, our murders, we are not going to be judged.”
Czeslaw Milosz, Discreet Charm of Nihilism
'Woe to that man by whom the Son of man is betrayed.'
Mt. 26:24
The headline yesterday here was 'Wax On, Wax Off.'
The spike rally of the last two days was the 'wax on.'
Guess what today was?
There is a triple witch option expiration on this Friday, based on the calendar I have been posting.
In short, this was a trading setup for the quad witch. What a surprise.
We even had the usual talking heads muttering about a 100 bp increase by the Fed in September.
What did we say before? 75 bp is baked in, the pivot is an delusion, and 100 bp is highly unlikely.
The Dollar rocketed higher today, slamming gold and silver.
I didn't think they had much of a shot at moving higher, especially given the dearth of physical in Hong Kong. They need to scour some coin out of a few of the ETFs.
I would be a little more constructive on the metals after today, with due caution.
Stock market volume was nothing to write home about. No real panic.
This is another indication that this was a fairly cynical trading gambit.
And the volatility will get worse, as long as regulation stays so subdued, and the risk reward for cheating is so favorable.
So Jay, how is that 'internal investigation' coming along into that brazen insider trading by the Fed Governors?
Have a pleasant evening.
