Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Phantoms and Shadows

 

"For now we see through a glass, darkly— but then face to face.  Now I know in part, but then shall I know, even as also I am known."

1 Corinthians 13:12

"The one desire which should move us should be, first of all, that of seeing Him face to face, who is now hid from us; and next of enjoying eternal and direct communion, in and through Him, with our friends around us, whom at present we know only through precarious and partial channels, which give us little insight into their hearts.

These are suitable feelings towards this attractive but deceitful world.  To those who live by faith, every thing they see speaks of that future world; the very glories of nature, the sun, moon, and stars, and the richness and the beauty of the earth, witnessing and teaching the invisible things of God."

John Henry Newman, The Greatness and Littleness of Human Life, 23 Oct 1836

"The selfishness of an age that has devoted itself to the mere cult of pleasure has tainted the whole human race with an error that makes all our acts more or less lies against God.  The devil is no fool.  He can get people feeling about heaven the way they ought to feel about hell.  He can make them fear the means of grace the way they do not fear sin.  And he does so, not by light but by obscurity, not by realities but by shadows."

Thomas Merton, No Man Is an Island

"In the famous simile of the cave Plato compares men to prisoners in a cave who are bound and can look in only one direction. They have a fire behind them and see on a wall the shadows of themselves and of objects behind them. Since they see nothing but the shadows, they regard those shadows as real and are not aware of the objects. Finally one of the prisoners escapes and comes from the cave into the light of the sun.

For the first time he sees real things and realises that he had been deceived hitherto by the shadows. For the first time he knows the truth and thinks only with sorrow of his long life in the darkness. The real philosopher is the prisoner who has escaped from the cave into the light of truth, he is the one who possesses real knowledge. This immediate connection with truth or, we may in the Christian sense say, with God is the new reality."

Werner Heisenberg, Physics and Philosophy

Ex umbris et imaginibus in veritatem.   
Out of the images and the shadows into the truth.

John Henry Newman, Epitaph, 1890

There will be a quarterly quad witch option expiration this Friday.

Stocks rallied.

VIX fell.

The Dollar chopped sideways.

Gold and silver were hit.

Just another day in the phantoms and shadows of the fallen republic.

Have a pleasant evening.

 

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Our Lady of Sorrows - Quad Witch Expiration Tomorrow

 

"The child’s father and mother were amazed at what was said about him; and Simeon blessed them and said to Mary his mother, 'Behold, this child is destined for the fall and rise of many in Israel, and to be a sign that will be opposed, and a sword will pierce your own soul, so that the thoughts of many hearts may be revealed.”

Luke 2:33-35


"When Jesus saw his mother, and the disciple whom he loved standing near, he said, 'Woman, behold, your son.'  Then he said to his disciple, 'Behold, your mother.'  And from that moment the disciple took her into his home."

John 19:26-27


"When they had seen him, they spread the word concerning what had been told them about this child, and all who heard it were amazed at what the shepherds said to them.  And Mary treasured up all these things, and pondered them in her heart."

Luke 2:17-19


"And a great sign appeared in heaven: a woman clothed in the sun, with the moon under her feet and a crown of twelve stars on her head."

Revelation 12:1


“Simon, Simon, behold, Satan demanded to sift all of you like wheat.  But I have prayed that your own faith may not fail.  And once you have returned to faith, you must strengthen your brothers.”

Luke 22:31-32

The Dollar and VIX chopped sideways and were essentially unchanged.

The spokesmodels were talking up 'King Dollar' with pom-poms flashing.  Sis boom bah.

Stocks declined quite a bit but came back from the selling pressure in the last half hour.

Gold and silver were slammed.

What a surprise.

Tomorrow must be a major stock option expiration and rebalancing, aka a 'quad witch.'

Lawless, with little to no consequences.

Fedex withdrew their 2023 earnings forecast in an early announcement after the bell and was knocked down 11%.  Ouch.

Have a pleasant evening.

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - And There's the Rinse - Quad Witch on Friday

 

"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.

 

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Risk Off On the Quad Witch - Oligarchy Follies

“When Fascism came into power, most people were unprepared, both theoretically and practically.  They were unable to believe that man could exhibit such propensities for evil, such lust for power, such disregard for the rights of the weak, or such yearning for submission.  Only a few had been aware of the rumbling of the volcano preceding the outbreak.”

Erich Fromm, Escape from Freedom


"I understand why an equality that was founded upon God involved neither contradiction nor disorder.  Demagogy enters at the moment when, for want of a common denominator, the principle of equality degenerates into the principle of identity."

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Flight to Arras


"Fascism begins the moment a ruling class, fearing the people may use their political democracy to gain economic democracy, begins to destroy political democracy in order to retain its power of exploitation and special privilege."

Thomas Clement Douglas

As you know today was a quad witch in stocks, and shenanigans were expected to be at a high level.

Stocks traded wobbly most of the morning and Europe closed for the weekend quietly.

But around one stocks started dropping precipitously. I happened to be watching the stock futures and noticed the sharp change in trading 'tone' right away. They were dropping steadily and with some conviction on both the SP and the NDX. Something had clearly happened. So I pulled the trigger on a short order I had teed up for the weekend, and went looking.

Bloomberg TV was showing nothing. Even on their news headlines on the right side there was nothing showing except for a headline 'Breaking News' that Walmart was dropping e-cigarettes. The on air discussion was some infotainment discussion about how to play the next rally, yada yada.

I flipped over to Fox Business, which is something I almost never do, and bam, they were showing breaking news that China had just cancelled a visit to Montana to discuss agricultural purchases, and Trump was making noises about what a hard and complete deal he was going to be driving with China. Fox was covering the hell out of the story, and putting it in context with the market decline.

Back to Bloomberg and there was nothing. Even when their most seasoned news pro Mark Crumpton came on with the headlines at 1:30 there was nothing, and nothing on the sidebars.

Finally when she did a review of the markets, which were clearly dropping pretty hard, Scarlet Fu read off a piece of paper that the Chinese had cancelled their Montana meeting, and that some thought this is why stocks were dropping. And while they mentioned it a few more times in the afternoon, it was never really covered as news per se, although Joe Weisenthal had a chuckle about it, when they said that he was watching it.

So I was wondering if this was a real thing, or just some quad witch shenanigans. If so they should say so, not just ignore it.

Well I let it ride, since I wanted to have some short side coverage for my long holdings over the weekend.

But it seemed more than odd. Fox Business scooping Bloomberg on financial news that moves the markets is like the Orioles sweeping a three game series against the Yankees.

Let's see what happens next week. This is where the fog of corruption has descended over the markets.

There will be a fairly important gold option expiration on the Comex on the 25th. October is an active month for gold, not so much for silver.

Stocks went out near to their lows. Gold and silver went out near their highs. The VIX was higher along with the Dollar.

That precious metals market rigging charge, with RICO overtones, against JPM was such a big nothing, like some wiseguys have claimed, that the gold leverage lords of the LBMA just kicked the head of JPM's precious metals desk off their board.   Is this like the time Lucky Luciano booted Dutch Schultz out of the Five Families for excessive moral turpitude?   QED

And so we had a quiet flight to safety, ninja-style.

Have a pleasant weekend.

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Autumn - FOMC and Comex Option Expiration Next Week

There was a 'flash crash' in the precious metals futures this morning in honor of the quad witch option expiration.

This is the Dr. Evil strategy, as so named by the US traders who got nailed pulling this baloney in the European bond market some years ago.

It is a massive dumping of contracts into a dull market for the purpose of gaming the price to achieve some objective.

There is a rollback of financial reform and purposefully lax enforcement under the Republicans, who are servants to the moneyed interests. The corporate Democrats do not really care about financial reform either, except to pay it lip service. Like so many other donor-sensitive topics in our corrupt political system it interferes with their pandering to the big money interests which they favor.

One of the spokesmodels called this a 'risk on' day. While the VIX declined a bit, stocks really not robust at all. It was a quad witch day in which fundamentals apply even less than normal.

Next week there will be an FOMC meeting, with 100% probability of a rate increase, and also an option expiration on the Comex, mostly involving gold. I have included the calendars below.

My mail order of Hula Daddy Kona coffee showed up today, just in time for the weekend.  My son is into coffees.  It's a treat for him.

Need little, want less, love more. For those who abide in love abide in God, and God in them.

Have a pleasant evening.