NAVs of Certain Precious Metal ETFs and Funds

SP Futures Hourly Chart Updated at 3 PM

See why we put *IF* the neckline is broken on that potential H&S top?

Goldman, Wall Street and their friends in government and the media came out swinging this morning. The SP futures took off from the neckline on some fairly thin rationales, but good enough for an end of month paint job.

This is starting to feel like a real top being formed, with the Wall Street crowd and their demimonde out with the pom poms trying to cheer the institutions and smaller investors with end of month 401k money into the market to buy them out of this anemic rally near a high note.

If you are long or hedged as we are in a paired trade then you are doing all right for a choppy market, and if you are short your timing is probably a little ahead of the market at least, and you are feeding the machine. If you are long and strong, well then, good luck to you.

Be careful. For the longer term this rally appears to be just business as usual into the end of the month with insiders selling vigorously and with a few of the Wall Street crowd front running it with positional and inside information on every turn.

As a reminder watch the VIX and the NDX futures, and perhaps a broader index or two, as well as the SP 500 since those futures are the paintbrush most highly favored by the tape painters.

GDP tomorrow. Who can tell how it will turn out, except to say it will likely be revised. We'll ignore the headline and look more deeply into the numbers.

SP Futures Hourly Chart at 2:30 PM EDT

A potential Head and Shoulders top has formed. It will be a valid formation but the objective will not be activated until and unless the neckline is broken.

Volumes remain light, with lots of technical gamesmanship that contributes to quite a bit of volatility in the short term, aka a 'daytrader's market.'

There is quite a bit of 'tension' in the market ahead of the GDP report tomorrow. The consensus is for growth of 1.5%. We are still a couple of weeks short of the timeframe we have projected for a top and the beginning of a leg down in markets, but some data or exogenous surprise could accelerate this.

There is a de facto partnership between the government and the banks with regard to the financial system and the economy which is spilling over to the equity markets. This is a similar arrangement that brought us the housing bubble and the credit crisis after the tech bubble and crash of 2001, which itself was a reaction to the Asian and Russian currency crisis of the late 1990's.

The financial engineers will likely not abandon their efforts until they either succeed, or finally shake the real economy apart and destroy the US financial system and currency. How they define 'success' is likely to be stability at the price of freedom, a classic oligarchy with 'enlightened despots.' Their financial engineering will require ever greater control over policy and priorities to maintain its artificial equilibrium.

The banks must be restrained, the financial system reformed, and the economy brought back into balance before there can be a sustained recovery.