Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Storm Warnings

 

"No one screams against this hell.  No one protests.  And if they abhor what they see, they do not have the courage to damn the damned.  One alone would not have failed us.  Péguy would have spoken, I hope, he would have let loose his scream.  He is not here, and there is no one else."

André Suarès, 1939

“We must always tell what we see.  Above all, and this is more difficult, we must always see what we see.”

Charles Péguy

"Bully-worship, under various disguises, has become a universal religion."

George Orwell, Review of Bertrand Russell's Power, Adelphi, 1939

“Ayn Rand's 'philosophy' is nearly perfect in its immorality, which makes the size of her audience all the more ominous and symptomatic as we enter a curious new phase in our society.  Moral values are in flux.  The muddy depths are being stirred by new monsters and witches from the deep.  Trolls walk the American night.  Caesars are stirring in the Forum.  There are storm warnings ahead.”

Gore Vidal, Comment, Esquire, July 1, 1961

"Legitimate power always includes attentiveness to justice.  When power is not attentive to justice it cannot endure.  The market ideology is now the new form of imperial power and many of us, without any critical reflection, have signed onto that and organized our lives in that way."

Walter Brueggemann, Truth Speaks to Power, 2013

"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

"The gates of hell are open night and day; the descent is smooth, and easy is the way.  But to return to the open air again, and view the cheerful skies, in this the task and mighty labor lies."

Virgil, The Aeneid

Stocks took a dive today, finishing off near the lows.

VIX rose.

The Dollar climbed a little higher.

Gold rallied a bit while silver flattened after a big intraday drop.

The US apparently has persuaded Israel to hold off on their invasion of Gasa in order to allow the US to deploy more missile defense systems 'to protect US troops.'

I suspect this, and the timeliness for a rinse in the old wash-rinse cycle, was the primary motivation.

There was some positive economic news, but meh, it looks like the markets are a bit jumpy.

We'll be getting another Payrolls report at the end of next week, but really the timing and scope of a Middle East conflict seems to be the primary influence for market sentiment.

Have a pleasant evening.

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Willful Blindness

 

“Perhaps it is a universal truth that the loss of liberty at home is to be charged against provisions against danger, real or pretended, from abroad.”

James Madison, Letter to Thomas Jefferson, 1798

“In truth, however, nothing is inevitable and very little is new.  Many of our most vaunted innovations are simply methods – electronic or otherwise – of pulling off some age-old profit-maximizing maneuver by new and unregulated means.”

Thomas Frank, Listen Liberal

“Before mass leaders seize the power to fit reality to their lies, their propaganda is marked by its extreme contempt for facts as such, for in their opinion fact depends entirely on the power of man who can fabricate it.”

Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism

"Our country is in a moment of crisis decades in the making, a moment in which America’s middle class has been hollowed out, working people have been betrayed, and democracy itself is under threat.  While it is easy to blame President Trump for our problems, the truth is that our challenges began long before him.  And without serious reforms, they are just as likely to outlast him."

Elizabeth Warren, A Foreign Policy that Works for All Americans ,, American University, November 30, 2018

“The combination of power, optimism and abstract thinking makes powerful people more certain.  The more cut-off they are from others, the more confident they are that they are right.”

Margaret Heffernan, Willful Blindness, 2012

Stocks wanted to bounce today, and they managed to pull it off, although finishing well off the highs.

VIX fell.

The Dollar rose sharply.

Gold and silver opened lower and pretty much finished up there unchanged for the day.

Alphabet reported after the bell, and the stock was sold.

Microsoft beat warnings and the stock was higher.

Meta, the vanity project formerly known as Facebook, reports tomorrow.

A shockingly large amount of the stock gains in the SP500 are attributable to just a handful of stocks.

Exogenous issues continue to weigh heavily, despite the assurance of the spokesmodels and strategists to just sit tight in equities or buy more. 

Apparently there has been an "unprecedented departure" of the Chinese banks from the LBMA Gold Price auctions.  

You probably have not heard about it.  You can read about it here.

 And in late breaking news after the bell, Trump's former chief-of-staff has accepted immunity from the Department of Justice, and presumably is going to be providing evidence for them.  

This is in addition to the earlier news that another one of Trump's attorneys Jenna Ellis pled guilty to a deal in the state of Georgia elections case.

If the GOP movers and shakers starts publicly distancing on Trump's candidacy you know he is done.   

Have a pleasant evening.

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - The Blinding Power of Hate and Fear

 

“Now that I come to think of it, I remember Christian teachers telling me long ago that I must hate a bad man's actions, but not hate the bad man: or, as they would say, hate the sin but not the sinner.  For a long time I used to think this a silly, straw-splitting distinction: how could you hate what a man did and not hate the man?  But years later it occurred to me that there was one man to whom I had been doing this all my life—namely myself.

However much I might dislike my own cowardice or conceit or greed, I went on loving myself.  There had never been the slightest difficulty about it.  In fact the very reason why I hated the things was that I loved the man.  Just because I loved myself, I was sorry to find that I was the sort of man who did those things.

Consequently, Christianity does not want us to reduce by one atom the hatred we feel for cruelty and treachery.  We ought to hate them.  Not one word of what we have said about them needs to be unsaid.   But it does want us to hate them in the same way in which we hate things in ourselves: being sorry that the man should have done such things, and hoping, if it is anyway possible, that somehow, sometime, somewhere, he can be cured and made human again.

The real test is this.  Suppose one reads a story of filthy atrocities in the paper.  Then suppose that something turns up suggesting that the story might not be quite true, or not quite so bad as it was made out.  Is one's first feeling, 'Thank God, even they aren't quite so bad as that,' or is it a feeling of disappointment, and even a determination to cling to the first story for the sheer pleasure of thinking your enemies are as bad as possible?

If it is the second then it is, I am afraid, the first step in a process which, if followed to the end, will make us into devils.  You see, one is beginning to wish that black was a little blacker.  If we give that wish its head, later on we shall wish to see grey as black, and then to see white itself as black.

Finally we shall insist on seeing everything — God and our friends and ourselves included — as bad, and not be able to stop doing it: we shall be fixed for ever in a universe of pure hatred.”

C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, 1952

"It seems that under the overwhelming impact of rising power, humans are deprived of their inner independence and, more or less consciously, give up establishing an autonomous position toward the emerging circumstances.  The fact that the foolish person is often stubborn must not blind us to the fact that he is not independent.  In conversation with him, one virtually feels that one is dealing not at all with him as a person, but with slogans, catchwords, and the like that have taken possession of him.

He is under a spell, blinded, misused, and abused in his very being.  Having thus become a mindless tool, the foolish person will also be capable of any evil and at the same time incapable of seeing that it is evil.  This is where the danger of diabolical misuse lurks, for it is this that can once and for all destroy human beings.”

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers From Prison

"The lofty mind of man can be imprisoned by the artifices of its own making.   If there are damned souls in Hell, it is because men blind themselves."

E.A. Bucchianeri, Faust: My Soul Be Damned for the World


Stocks had another wide ranging day, with the broader markets lower, which is unusual for a Monday of late. 

The NDX 100 finished higher, thanks to the Bloviating 7 of big tech.

Surprisingly the VIX was lower.

The Dollar declined.

Gold and silver declined.

Like the spokesmodels and talking heads one could spend quite a bit of time looking for triggers in today's wildly swinging action.    

Some fairly inconsequential remarks by Ackman, Gross, and Powell during the day would seemingly be suspects for the 'big moves.'

But at the end of the day it seems fairly obvious that investors are not in there moving things.

This is a market completely overshadowed by the smoldering powder keg in the Mideast, as well as a few other places where the big powers are shoving and pushing, like the Ukraine, the China Sea, etc.

Troubled times of exogenous risk make for volatile markets.

Traders may spot certain groups of bulls and bears leaning too heavily in some direction, and seek to foment a powerful technical move in the short run to take some scalps.

In a fundamentally broken market these short term technical trades can easily dominate. 

It is not capital allocation in the traditional sense.  It is all a game.  And it has been becoming moreso and for longer terms, year after year.   

This is the harvest of the moral hazard and the steadily PR campaign against the rule of law.

Nevertheless, the risks of a big even-driven move are unusually high.

Be ready for a dramatic move when it comes, but try not to feed the sharks by taking obvious long shot positions early on.  

Remember that in the aggregate they can read the hands you are playing, and have stacked the deck as well.   Yes it's a simple scam and a lot of informed people know it, and go along to get along.

It's what they do.  Blind themselves. 

Have a pleasant evening.