08 October 2012

SP 500 and NDX Futures Daily Charts - Lightest Day of the Year


About 400 million shares were traded on the NYSE today as the adults took a holiday from the bond market and the kids came in to trade equities.

Nothing done really. Earnings kick off this week. Widespread concerns about slowing growth. The pigmen are rampant.

Facebook was cut to sell today by an analyst who had concerns about their ability to grow future revenues. Is the Facebook IPO some sort of watershed event? We will not know for a few years, but Benny will almost certainly to do his best to keep the party going.




SP 500 Futures - A Closer Look - Miseria Ex Machina


The woods decay, the woods decay and fall,
The vapours weep their burthen to the ground,
Man comes and tills the field and lies beneath,
And after many a summer dies the swan.

Alfred Lord Tennyson, Tithonus

This is a classic "wash and rinse cycle" within a greater uptrend. Whether it may continue to be so could be determined by the new earnings cycle that begins this week, the dilemma that is Europe, or the ongoing political process of financialisation.

Far from being a capital forming mechanism, the US equity market has been allowed to degenerate, once again, into a vehicle largely dominated by frauds and schemes of wealth transferral.

A person might as well brag of making a fortune in the stock market by short term speculation in the same manner that a first rate pickpocket might boast of making a rich harvest in the town square during some public event, distracting by spreading rumours, alarms, and other misdirection.

Having made their wealth in a generational fraud, the oligarchs mean to keep it by any and all means, including beggaring the world if only to make their own fortunes shine brighter.

This is capitalism in decline, as justice fails, or more precisely, is bought into silent partnership. And the killing of conscience in financial things opens a Pandora's box of maladies of the spirit and the madness of hardened hearts.

And there is no finer symbol of this decline than the current electoral contest, which appears but a Hobson's choice between the corruptly lax magistrate and the pre-eminently audacious highwayman.

Nanex: Investors Need to Realize that the Machines Have Taken Over



Net Asset Value Premiums of Certain Precious Metal Trusts and Funds