Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Aspirations

 

"It is the time of the harvest, and the reaper cuts into the ripe grain with wide strokes.  Mourning takes up her abode in the country cottages, and there is no one to dry the tears of the mothers.  Yet Hitler feeds those people whose most precious belongings he has stolen and whom he has driven to a meaningless death with lies.

Every word that comes from Hitler's mouth is a lie.  When he says peace, he means war, and when he blasphemously uses the name of the Almighty, he means the power of evil, the fallen angel, Satan.  His mouth is the foul maw of Hell, and his power is at bottom accursed.  True, we must conduct a struggle against the Nazi terrorist state with rational means; but whoever today still doubts the reality, the existence of demonic powers, has failed by a wide margin to understand the metaphysical background of this war.

Behind the concrete, the visible events, behind all objective, logical considerations, we find the irrational element:  The struggle against the demon, against the servants of the Antichrist.

Everywhere and always demonic powers lurk in the dark, waiting for the moment when man is weak; when of his own volition he leaves his place in Creation, as founded for him by God in freedom; when he yields to the force of evil, he separates himself from the powers of a higher order; and after voluntarily taking the first step, he is driven on to the next and the next at a furiously accelerating rate.

Everywhere, and at times of greatest trials, men have appeared, prophets and saints who cherished their freedom, who preached the One God and who with His help brought the people to a reversal of their downward course.  Man is free, to be sure, but without the true God he is defenseless against the principle of evil.  He is a like rudderless ship, at the mercy of the storm, an infant without his mother, a cloud dissolving into thin air."

Please distribute this as widely as possible.

The White Rose, Fourth Leaflet, Munich, 1942

“"It is very easy to get drunk with hate. Hate is like the glass of whisky which is given to the soldiers before a bayonet charge. Whisky stimulates but does not nourish. Hate is not creative, only love is creative.

No one in the world can change truth.  What we can do and and should do is to seek truth and to serve it when we have found it.  The real conflict is the inner conflict.  Beyond armies of occupation and the catacombs of extermination camps, there are two irreconcilable enemies in the depth of every soul: good and evil, sin and love.  And what use are the victories on the battlefield if we are ourselves are defeated in our innermost personal selves?”

Maximilian Kolbe, executed at Auschwitz, 14 August 1941


"The most important problem in the world today is your soul, for that is what the struggle is all about."

Fulton J. Sheen

 

Stocks tried to shake off the bad earnings report from Snap, which cast doubt on the health of the online advertising milieu.

And some of the big tech regulars are announcing hiring freezes.

Next week the big tech heavyweights will be rolling out their earnings reports.  That may likely set the tone for the week.

And the Fed will be meeting again.   

Gold and silver rose with the continuing Dollar drift lower.

Gold managed to hold on to some of its gains, but silver fell with equities and finished up flat on the week.

Most investors will find it more practical to play the long game with gold and silver, and hold it without leverage for the longer term. 

Wall Street is a corrupting and poorly policed casino.

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

Have a pleasant weekend.

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

 

"The oligarchic character of the modern English commonwealth does not rest, like many oligarchies, on the cruelty of the rich to the poor.   It does not even rest on the kindness of the rich to the poor.

It rests on the perennial and unfailing kindness of the poor to the rich."

G. K. Chesterton, Heretics


"We've become, now, an oligarchy instead of a democracy.  I think that's been the worst damage to the basic moral and ethical standards to the American political system that I've ever seen in my life."

Jimmy Carter, television interview, September 27, 2015


"It is precisely this — high-powered computers and the swagger of those who operate them — that is causing worries over high-frequency trading’s increasing sway.  'The markets used to be about capital formation,' said Mr. Quast, the consultant.  'Now 80 percent of trading is driven by some form of statistical arbitrage.  We are buying into a statistical house of cards that could unravel very quickly.'”

Landon Thomas, Inquiry Stokes Concern over Trading Firms that Shape Markets, 3 September 2009


“They were careless people, Tom and Daisy — they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby


"A rogue does not laugh in the same way that an honest man does; a hypocrite does not shed the tears of a man of good faith. All falsehood is a mask; and however well made the mask may be, with a little attention we may always succeed in distinguishing it from the true face."

Alexandre Dumas, Les Trois Mousquetaires


“We can have democracy in this country or we can have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we cannot have both.”

Louis Brandeis, source


"God has a way of standing before the nations with judgement, and it seems that I can hear God saying to America 'You are too arrogant!  If you don't change your ways, I will rise up and break the backbone of your power!  And I will place it in the hands of a nation that doesn't even know my name.  Be still, and know that I am God.'"

Martin Luther King, Why I Am Opposed to the War in Vietnam, 1967


The ECB bid au revoir to nominally negative interest rates today. 

And so the euro rallied and the Dollar declined a little further into the 106 handle, which is still rather elevated.

Stocks rallied on the bad economic news this morning.'

It's that kind of Fed-eriffic, otherworldly market.

Gold and silver rallied sharply after a big overnight plunge in honor of the Comex option expiration and FOMC decision next week.

The VIX is at recent lows.  I put a more extended VIX chart up to put it into a broader context.

Stocks have a way to go in order to take out those secondary highs on the CrashTrak model.

But they are finally having a decent go at it. 

Have a pleasant evening.

 

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Here We Stand - Comex Metals Expiration on Friday

 

"What we would like to do is change the world— make it a little simpler for people to feed, clothe and shelter themselves as God intended them to do.  And to a certain extent, by fighting for better conditions, by crying out unceasingly for the rights of the workers, of the poor, of the destitute— the rights of the worthy and the unworthy poor in other words, we can to a certain extent change the world; we can work for the oasis, the little cell of joy and peace in a harried world.   We can throw our pebble in the pond and be confident that its ever widening circle will reach around the world."

Dorothy Day, The Catholic Worker, June 1946

“By means of gradual, treacherous, systematic abuse, the system has put every man into a spiritual prison.  Everywhere and always demonic powers lurk in the dark, waiting for the moment when man is weak; when of his own volition he leaves his place in Creation, as founded for him by God in freedom; when he yields to the force of evil, he separates himself from the powers of a higher order; and after voluntarily taking the first step, he is driven on to the next and the next at a furiously accelerating rate."

Sophie Scholl, The White Rose, Munich 1942

"Caesar was swimming in blood, Rome and the whole pagan world was mad.   But those who had had enough of transgression and madness, those who were trampled upon, those whose lives were misery and oppression, all the weighed down, all the sad, all the unfortunate, came to hear the wonderful tidings of God, who out of love for men had given Himself to be crucified and redeem their sins.   When they found a God whom they could love, they had found that which the society of the time could not give any one— happiness and love."

Henryk Sienkiewicz, Quo Vadis, 1905

“We are slow to master the great truth that even now Christ is, as it were, walking among us, and by His hand, or eye, or voice, bidding us to follow Him.  We do not understand that His call is a thing that takes place now.  We think it took place in the Apostles' days, but we do not believe in it; we do not look for it in our own case.  And yet the ever-blessed Spirit of God is there, ten times more glorious, more powerful than when He trod the earth in our flesh."

J. H. Newman

"Everyone knows that plagues have a way of recurring throughout history, yet somehow we find it hard to believe in the ones that crash down on us out of the sky. There have always been plagues and wars, yet they always take us by surprise. When war breaks out people say it's stupid and won't last long. Stupidity has a knack of getting its way, which we would see if not wrapped up in ourselves. In this our townsfolk were like everybody else— they did not believe in plagues."

Albert Camus, The Plague

"In the Incarnation the whole human race recovers the dignity of the image of God.  Thereafter, any attack even on the least of men is an attack on Christ, who took on the form of man, and in his own Person restored the image of God in all.   Through our relationship with the Incarnation, we recover our true humanity, and at the same time are delivered from that perverse individualism which is the consequence of sin, and recover our solidarity with all mankind."

Dietrich Bonhoeffer


Once again concerns were cast aside after a wobbly open, and stocks went into risk on mode and rallied higher once again.

The VIX has fallen to its recent lower bound.

Gold and silver were lower as the Dollar edged higher.

The inventory of physical gold in the Comex Hong Kong warehouses continues to diminish 

Gold is flowing from West to East.

There will be an option expiration for the precious metals on the Comex next week.  It is more significant for the gold contracts than for silver, but both typically go hand in hand in this scenario.

I hear in many cases the sentiment that the recent decline in stocks is of little consequence, and that even if they were to decline much further that they did so in 2008, and will likely turn out all right in the end once again.

I have included the latest in the CrashTrak calculations.  As you know the indices must exceed the second high in order to take this chart formation off the table.

Have a pleasant evening.