Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - On the Road to Damascus

 

"Hear this, you foolish and heartless people,  who have eyes that do not see and ears that do not hear."

Jeremiah 5:21

 

"They have treated the suffering of my people carelessly, saying, ‘all is well’ when there is no safety.  They act shamefully, they commit terrible offenses; and yet they are not ashamed, and do not even know how to blush.  They shall be found among those who are fallen." 

Jeremiah 6:14-15

 

“We run heedlessly into the abyss after putting something in front of us to stop us from seeing it.” 

Blaise Pascal, Pensées

 

"The selfishness of an age that has devoted itself to the mere cult of pleasure has tainted the whole human race with an error that makes all our acts more or less lies against God.   It is better to find God on the threshold of despair than to risk our lives in a complacency that has never felt the need of forgiveness."

Thomas Merton

 

"I was being called to surrender the very citadel of my self. I was completely in the dark.  I did not really know what repentance was or what I was required to repent of.  It was indeed the turning point of my life.  God had brought me to my knees and made me acknowledge my own nothingness, and out of that knowledge I had been reborn.  I was no longer the centre of my life, and therefore I could see God in everything." 

Bede Griffiths 

 

 The Dollar managed to hang on to the 90 handle today.

Gold gained slightly, while silver gave up a little of its recent gains.

Stocks were weak in the broader markets, but showed some buying in the 'story stocks' especially big cap techs.

Volumes and market activity remain very low due to seasonal factors.

You will be happier if you stop looking to see every little thing that people do that bothers you.  

And it will give you more time to look at yourself.

That's really the point of the distraction and obsession with finding faults in others— to prevent us from looking at ourselves, and into our own hardened and foolish and deluded hearts.

Have a pleasant evening.

 

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - An Attractive But Deceitful Recovery

 

"These violent delights have violent ends,
And in their triumph die..." 

William Shakespeare

 

"I know nothing that I may say can influence you.  You have no souls to be influenced.  You are spineless, flaccid things. You pompously call yourselves Republicans and Democrats.   You are lick-spittlers and panderers, the creatures of the Plutocracy." 

Jack London, The Iron Heel

 

“Evil when we are in its power is not felt as evil, but as a necessity, or even a duty.  Sin is not a distance, but is a turning of our gaze, in the wrong direction." 

 Simone Weil

 

Today was one of the lightest trading days of the year by volume.

And it was also a Comex metals option expiration, albeit one of slight significance.

As I said last week, the tape was scoured clean by wild swings and volatility.

And now the paint can be applied, into the year end. 

What does it profit a man, to gain the whole world, but to lose their souls.

But to virtually throw them away for so little?

Have a pleasant evening.

Christmas Day

Let all my nothingness be drowned in the ocean of your mercy.

Narrator:  Then the Grinch heard a sound  Rising over the snow.  

It started in low, Then it started to grow. 

But the sound wasn't sad.  Why, this sounded merry. 

But it was merry. Very. 

Every Who down in Whoville, The tall and the small, were singing without any presents at all. 

He hadn't stopped Christmas from coming. It came. 

Grinch: Somehow or other, it came Just the same! 

Narrator: And the Grinch, with his Grinch feet ice cold in the snow, Stood puzzling, and puzzling. 

Grinch: How could it be so?  It came without ribbons! It came without tags! It came without packages, boxes or bags! 

Narrator: And he puzzled and puzzled till his puzzler was sore. Then the Grinch thought of something he hadn't before. 

Grinch: Maybe Christmas he thought doesn't come from a store. Maybe Christmas, perhaps, means a little bit more. Max! Help me! I'm feeling!

Narrator: And what happened then, well, in Whoville they say, that the Grinch's small heart grew three sizes that day.

Dr. Suess, The Grinch Who Stole Christmas

"Man has places in his heart which do not yet exist— and into them enters suffering, in order that they may have life. 

Love does not make you weak, because it is the source of all strength— but it makes you see the nothingness of the illusory strength on which you depended before you knew it.” 

 Léon Bloy

 

“Love endures everything, love is stronger than death, love fears nothing.  Help me, Lord, that my eyes may see all with mercy, so that I may never suspect or judge from appearances, but look deeper for what is good and beautiful in others' souls, and then come to their aid. 

Let all my nothingness be drowned in the ocean of your mercy.” 

Maria Faustyna Kowalska

 

"God bless us, every one!" 

Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol 

 

 

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Implications of the Incarnation

 

"Only the humble believe in Him and rejoice that God is so free and so marvelous that He does wonders where people despair, that He takes what is little and lowly and makes it marvelous.  

And that is the wonder of all wonders, that God loves the lowly.  God is not ashamed of the lowliness of human beings.  God marches right in.  He chooses people as his instruments and performs His wonders where one would least expect them.  

God is near to lowliness; He loves the lost, the neglected, the unseemly, the excluded, the weak, and the broken. 

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

 

The markets will be closed until Monday. 

Merry Christmas!