Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Scam America - The 'Santa Claus Rally' Left Town

"Nevertheless, real sums have started to evaporate. And much of it happened with the biggest stocks in so-called tech. The seven FANGMAN stocks – Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, Google’s parent Alphabet, Microsoft, Apple, and NVIDIA – got hosed today. Again...

It gets costly when the entire market depends on a handful of over-hyped mega-caps."

Wolf Richter, Wolf Street


"The problem with movies and books is they make evil look glamorous, exciting, when it's no such thing.  It's boring and it's depressing and it's stupid.  Criminals are all after cheap thrills and easy money, and when they get them, all they want is more of the same, over and over.  They're shallow, empty, boring people who couldn't give you five minutes of interesting conversation if you had the poor luck to be at a party full of them.  Maybe some can be monkey-clever, some of the time, but they aren't hardly ever smart."

Dean Koontz

Stocks continued their declines today.

They are at support, on the very brink of a much larger decline.

A bit surprising given the bias of this holiday week, and the traditional 'Santa Claus rally.'

And yet one barely detects any fear, and the safe havens are of little interest.

We do have the phenomenon of the 'smart money' index declining markedly a few week ago.

This could just be a thorough wash and rinse ahead of the year end tape painting.

But I would not bet on that just yet.

I heard today that almost 50% of cellphone traffic will soon be scam messages and robocalls.   I think landline calls may already be past that.

It is nice to see the telecoms sector catching up with the monopolies in healthcare, big pharma, social media, and the financials.

My sister-in-law stopped in late last night after the long drive in from Ohio.  I was glad to see her, and greeted her with the perfect meal on a cold and damp night—  a hot bowl of beef noodle soup. 

She was shocked at how rich the broth and flavorful the broth was, with a simple beefy flavor.  She left very early this morning to join the rest of the band moms for their Thanksgiving Day adventure in NYC.  We are expecting the coldest day for the parade in history.  Yikes!

I made the last visit to the store today.   I discovered that I was out of poultry seasoning, and did not have everything at hand to make my up own.  The turkey necks purchased yesterday were slow cooked with a few other things into the broth for the stuffing and the gravy on Thursday.

Dolly was attentive to the smells coming from the kitchen.  But other than that, when the weather turns wet and cold, one can hardly pry her from the little nest she makes in the blankets on her chair.

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

Have a pleasant evening.

Update on the CrashTrak Equity Profile - A Banquet of Consequences Part II

"One of the most disturbing facts that came out in the [Adolf] Eichmann trial was that a psychiatrist examined him and pronounced him perfectly sane. I do not doubt it at all, and that is precisely why I find it disturbing.

If all the Nazis had been psychotics, as some of their leaders probably were, their appalling cruelty would have been in some sense easier to understand. It is much worse to consider this calm, 'well-balanced,' unperturbed official conscientiously going about his desk work, his administrative job which happened to be the supervision of mass murder.  He was thoughtful, orderly, unimaginative.  He had a profound respect for system...

The sanity of Eichmann is disturbing. We equate sanity with a sense of justice, with humaneness, with prudence, with the capacity to love and understand other people. We rely on the sane people of the world to preserve it from barbarism, madness, destruction. And now it begins to dawn on us that it is precisely the sane ones who are the most dangerous...

The whole concept of sanity in a society where spiritual values have lost their meaning is itself meaningless."

Thomas Merton, Raids on the Unspeakable

When you have allowed sociopaths to erect a system which rewards expediency, cleverness, and winning without regard and respect for human values, fairness, or even common mercy and the dignity of others; a society which views compassion and a sense of justice as a weakness to the point of a dangerous deviancy; a culture in which harshness and crudeness and the abuse of power in pursuit of even more wealth, or of the weak as an enjoyable diversion for the superior, are enshrined with a sign of growing strength the only virtue— with such role models and rewards, what else would you expect the highly educated but spiritually weak-willed and morally ambivalent professionals among you to do?

They will implement and execute to plan, under the cover of playing within the rules of a rigged game, with an efficient and myopically determined focus as they do with all that they undertake. They will march themselves into hell with a deluded sense of pride and high accomplishment.

And where do you think this madness will end?

If the bulls cannot stop the selling, put in a bottom, and turn this around we might be in for something notable.

Hopefully the bulls will be able to get their act together to at least stop the selling as they square up their positions into the holiday.

I have to say that I am not 'feeling the fear' yet and the safehavens are notably quiet.

And it would not take a lot to turn the market higher. A word or two from Trump, or one of his proxies, or the Fed's Jay Powell would likely do the trick.

The risk in that is, of course, that if they give it a go and it does not stick, then after an initial bounce the market may take another leg down with a vengeance.   And once the panic sets in, and the real fear selling is underway, it may be too late for jaw-boning to work, even if one if wielding the jawbone of a truly formidable donkey.

I have started to populate the spreadsheets I made in 2000, and last used in 2007, which track the movement of this market and compare it with significant declines from the past.

I have been underestimating the volatility in the NDX using eyeball measures on the chart. One really needs to plug the numbers in.

This is a light trading week. If the bulls cannot turn it on Wednesday or Friday then their hearts may not be in it.

The market is not dominated by 'value investing' but by momentum traders and algos. In that sense it is vulnerable to an outsized move, both up and down.

If there is a 'crash' as I noted some time ago there is little doubt it will be blamed on Trump's trade policies, and to some extent Brexit. This would be a coup for the globalists and freetraders.

They will never acknowledge that the Banks and their Fed willfully allowed an asset bubble to grow, for the third time, in order to continue the transfer of wealth to the top under the guise of investment and asset allocation.

When I dropped my son off at the airport I told him the stock market may crash while he is there, but not to be concerned because I have made provisions.

You may wish to do so as well, even though I still think a crash is a low probability event.

See you tonight.

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Lions, and Tigers, and Bears, Oh My! - US The Land of Cruel Delusions

"Money is not humanity’s best subject.  And although our body of scientific knowledge grows with each passing year, when it comes to financial matters, we somehow keep stepping on the same rake — that inescapable pattern of financial boom and bust."

James Grant


"There’s a verbal tic particular to a certain kind of response to a certain kind of story about the thinness and desperation of American society; about the person who died of preventable illness or the Kickstarter campaign to help another who can’t afford cancer treatment even with 'good' insurance; about the plight of the homeless or the lack of resources for the rural poor; about underpaid teachers spending thousands of dollars of their own money for the most basic classroom supplies; about train derailments, the ruination of the New York subway system and the decrepit states of our airports and ports of entry...

'I can’t believe this in the richest country in the world. …'

The social wealth of a society is better measured by the quality of its common lived environment than by a consolidated statistical approximation like GDP, or even an attempt at weighted comparisons like so-called purchasing power parity. There is a reason why our great American cities, for all of our supposed wealth, often feel and look so shabby. The money goes elsewhere...

Poverty—both individual and social—is a policy, not an accident, and not some kind of natural law.  These are deliberate choices about the allocation of resources.  They are eminently undoable by modest exercises of political power, although if the state- and city-level Democratic leaders of New York and northern Virginia are the national mold, then our nominally left-wing party is utterly, hopelessly beholden to the upward transfer of social wealth to an extremely narrow cadre of already extremely rich men and women."

Jacob Bacharach, The Egregious Lie Americans Tell Themselves


"Today, the first and perhaps the only duty of the philosopher is to defend man against himself: to defend man against that extraordinary temptation toward inhumanity to which - almost without being aware of it - so many human beings today have yielded."

Gabriel Marcel

Stocks were swooning today, perturbed by Brexit and Trexit: Britain's proposed exit from the EU and the Sino-American Trade Dispute and disengagement from 'free trade.'

Gold and silver were higher on a slightly weaker dollar.

There will be a precious metals option expiration next Tuesday.

This will be a holiday-shortened trading week due to the Thanksgiving holiday on Thursday.

The highly volatile NDX futures are in a cautionary state due to their renewed decline. The SP 500 has not yet followed and confirmed.

If life seems particularly confusing, perhaps you might consider the sources of information with which you are feeding your mind.   Some sites have become cornucopias of thinly disguised propaganda written by hawkers of hyperbolic hoo-haw.   They trade in false outrage, pander to prejudice, and will say almost anything for clicks.   They have chosen to serve mammon.

Alas, their commercial 'success' provides a bad example and rationale for many others to do the same, to succumb to the temptation to give themselves over to the glamours of death and deceit.

There should be little surprise that feeding your mind all day on such junk gives you a headache.

The young man is in London for the next two weeks, visiting his girlfriend who is finishing her studies there. He is still doing his degree work at NYU.   The out-of-town in-laws start arriving tonight.

Dolly and I abide.

Have a pleasant evening.

Precious Metals Flows In Trusts and Funds

The ebb and flow of the precious metals Grift-on-the-Hudson.