Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Liquidation - Who Could Have Seen It Coming

 

"Cannot I say, as truly at least of human laws, that where mystery begins, justice ends?"

Edmund Burke


“In a room where people unanimously maintain a conspiracy of silence, one word of truth sounds like a pistol shot.”

Czesław Miłosz


"The world of finance is a mysterious world in which, incredible as the fact may appear, evaporation precedes liquidation.  First the capital evaporates, and then the company goes into liquidation."

Joseph Conrad


“Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set him on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.”

Terry Pratchett

Stocks flipped over and dropped down to test the prior lows.

After the bell Alphabet and Microsoft reported earnings, and further roiled the volatility of the NDX.

VIX and the Dollar rose sharply.

The Dollar is now sporting a 102 handle on the DXY index.

The Dollar strength is essentially the inverse of weakness in the Euro, Pound, Yen and Loonie.

Gold bounced up a little while silver fell a bit lower.

We had a minor option expiration for the precious metals on the Comex today, more significant for silver than gold.

The miners were caught up in the equity selling for the most part.

The NDX has set a second low.

The SP 500 is on the edge of confirming.

 Let's see what happens.

Nothing is certain here.   But the risk is pronounced.

But all in all, it's a more peaceful view from higher ground.

Have a pleasant evening.

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Dollar Rises and Stocks Hold Support and Bounce

 

"The singular feature of the great crash of 1929 was that the worst continued to worsen.  What looked one day like the end proved on the next day to have been only the beginning.   Nothing could have been more ingeniously designed to maximize the suffering, and also to insure that as few as possible escaped the common misfortune.

The fortunate speculator who had funds to answer the first margin call presently got another and equally urgent one, and if he met that there would still be another.  In the end all the money he had was extracted from him and lost.  The man with the smart money, who was safely out of the market when the first crash came, naturally went back in to pick up bargains. 

The bargains then suffered a ruinous fall.  Even the man who waited out all of October and all of November, who saw the volume of trading return to normal and saw Wall Street become as placid as a produce market, and who then bought common stocks would see their value drop to a third or a fourth of the purchase price in the next twenty-four months. 

The Coolidge bull market was a remarkable phenomenon. The ruthlessness of its liquidation was, in its own way, equally remarkable." 

John Kenneth Galbraith, The Great Crash of 1929 

 

"Adversity makes men, and prosperity makes monsters." 

Victor Hugo 

 

"Those who have the faith had better keep in the state of grace, and those who have neither had better find out what they mean, for in the coming age there will be only one way to stop your trembling knees, and that will be to get down on them and pray.  The most important problem in the world today is your soul, for that is what the struggle is about." 

Fulton J. Sheen

 

Stocks slumped strikingly in the overnight futures and declined quite a bit towards critical support in the morning.

But during the day the bulls and their dip-buyers came in to stabilize prices, and then gradually then turned into the green, and rallied quietly but steadily into the close, going out near the highs.

Gold and silver were hit hard again.

The Dollar rallied higher, taking a firm hold on the 101 handle.

The VIX declined inversely to the stock rally in the afternoon.

Nice bounce for equities.  Let's see if they can keep it together.

Have a pleasant evening.

 

 

 

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Almost Time to Head for Higher Ground

 

"Over the last thirty years, the United States has been taken over by an amoral financial oligarchy, and the American dream of opportunity, education, and upward mobility is now largely confined to the top few percent of the population.  Federal policy is increasingly dictated by the wealthy, by the financial sector, and by powerful industries such as telecommunications, health care, automobiles, and energy. These policies are implemented and praised by these groups’ willing servants, namely the increasingly bought-and-paid-for leadership of America’s political parties, academia, and lobbying industry.

If allowed to continue, this process will turn the United States into a declining, unfair society with an impoverished, angry, uneducated population under the control of a small, ultrawealthy elite.  Such a society would be not only immoral but also eventually unstable, dangerously ripe for religious and political extremism."

Charles Ferguson, Predator Nation, June 2012


"Our plutocracy, whether the hedge fund managers in Greenwich, Connecticut, or the Internet moguls in Palo Alto, now lives like the British did in colonial India: ruling the place but not of it."

Mike Lofgren, The Deep State: The Fall of the Constitution and the Rise of a Shadow Government, 5 January 2016

"The American economy increasingly serves only a narrow part of society, and America's national politics has failed to put the country back on track through honest, open, and transparent problem solving.  Too many of America's elites — among the super-rich, the CEOs, and many of my colleagues in academia — have abandoned a commitment to social responsibility.  They chase wealth and power, the rest of society be damned."

Jeffrey Sachs, The Price of Civilization, January 2012


“If you can feel that staying human is worth while, even when it can't have any practical result whatsoever, you've beaten them.”

George Orwell

Stocks came in a little stronger this morning, but then reversed and turned sharply lower, and went out at the lows of the day as well.

Gold and silver were lower as most everything that was not the Dollar or Treasuries were getting sold.

It resembled a liquidation event, or at least the prologue to one.

Smells like teen spirit.

The Fed spooked the markets that are now pricing in a trio of 50 basis point rate increases this year.

At some point either the Fed or the markets are going to blink.

Let's see what happens.

I'm making the national dish of England for dinner this evening— tikka masala.

Have a pleasant weekend.