Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - God's Economy - Feeling Risky

 

"God chooses those that the world judges foolish to shame the wise.  God chooses those that the world thinks weak to shame the strong.  And God chooses the people and things that are insignificant and contemptible to the world, which it regards as worth nothing, to show the uselessness of that which the world esteems."

1 Corinthians 1:27-28

"It is one of the most sublime ironies of God's economy that the greatest weapon in our battle is not the violence and power of the world, but the service and self-effacement of God's love.  As Léon Bloy said, '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.'   The power of love and forgiveness is unfathomable and bewildering to the principalities and powers of this world, and the spiritual darkness that rules them.   And this is to be their failure and their demise."

Jesse, 20 February 2018


"And that is the wonder of all wonders, that God loves the lowly.  God marches right in.  He chooses people as his instruments and performs his wonders where one would least expect them." 

Dietrich Bonhoeffer 

 

"I've seen something wondrous peering through my joy in the beautiful, a sense of its creator.  Only people can be truly ugly, because they have free will to separate themselves from this song of praise.  It often seems they will drown out this hymn with cannon thunder, curses, and blasphemy.  But I have realized they will not succeed.  And so I want to throw myself on the side of the victor.” 

Sophie Scholl

 

"Wonderful providence indeed which is so silent, yet so efficacious, so constant, so unerring.  This is what baffles the power of Satan.  He cannot discern the Hand of God in what goes on; and though he would fain meet it and encounter it, in his mad and blasphemous rebellion against heaven, he cannot find it.  Such is the rule of our warfare.  We advance by yielding; we rise by falling; we conquer by suffering; we persuade by silence; we become rich by bountifulness; we inherit the earth through meekness; we gain comfort through mourning; we earn glory by penitence and prayer."

John Henry Newman

It was risk on today, and stocks responded to the call of the wild, moving higher.

The Dollar gave up the 100 handle.

The VIX declined.

Gold and silver rallied higher in a bit of a countertrend move.

Oh yeah we have an option expiration dead ahead.

Have a pleasant evening.

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - The Cock Crows - Option Expiration on Thursday

 

A little later some of the other bystanders came over to Peter and said, “You must be one of them; we can tell by your Galilean accent.” Peter swore, “A curse on me if I’m lying—I don’t know the man!”  And immediately the rooster crowed. Suddenly, Jesus’ words flashed through Peter’s mind: “Before the rooster crows, you will deny three times that you even know me.”

And he slipped away from them, weeping bitterly.

Matthew 26:71-75

“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

 

"Do not despair, do not despond, but renew your soul by repentance, and tears, and confession, and by doing good things."

John Chrysostom

 

Stocks were in rally mode today--  and then they weren't.

The spokesmodels said it was because oil went back up over $100.

A wash and rinse by any other name.

Gold and silver moved higher.   Gold is making a move to break out - or not.

The Dollar cracked up into 100 handle.

Markets will be closed on Good Friday.

Have a pleasant evening.

 

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Forget It Jake - The Great Wealth Transfer Mechanism

 

"The sense of responsibility in the financial community for the community as a whole is not small.  It is nearly nil.  Perhaps this is inherent.  In a community where the primary concern is making money, one of the necessary rules is to live and let live.  To speak out against madness may be to ruin those who have succumbed to it.  So the wise in Wall Street are nearly always silent.  The foolish thus have the field to themselves.  None rebukes them."

John Kenneth Galbraith, The Great Crash of 1929


"Anyone who bought stocks in mid-1929 and held onto them saw most of his or her adult life pass by before getting back to even.”

Richard M. Salsman


"How did we get into this mess in the first place?  As in the 1920s, the current 'disturbance' started with a 'mania.'  But manias always have a cause.  If you investigate individually the manias that the market has so dubbed over the years, in every case, it was expansive monetary policy that generated the boom in an asset.

The particular asset varied from one boom to another.  But the basic underlying propagator was too-easy monetary policy and too-low interest rates...  And then of course if monetary policy tightens, the boom collapses."

Brian M Carney, Bernanke Is Fighting the Last War, Oct. 18, 2008


"Foolishness has a knack of getting its way; as we should see if we were not always so much wrapped up in ourselves.  In this respect our townsfolk were like everybody else, wrapped up in themselves; they did not believe in plagues."

Albert Camus, The Plague

Well the good news is that stocks have a ways to go lower if we are looking at a genuine CrashTrak signal.

The bad news if you are holding on to this mess you are losing a lot of your recent profits, for mostly nothing.

I came in from Friday evening short, and took them down before the close today.

Let's see where they take this thing next.  It's a bit early in the year for a crash landing.  But they have a very good scapegoat teed up.

Don't want to waste a crisis, or a distraction.  Look at Boris Johnson go.

Gold and silver rallied hard in the morning, but were quickly hit and hard back down to a little over unchanged.

Strafing the lifeboats is harsh but effective.   Especially if you are feeling especially audacious and unindictable.

The Dollar edged a little higher to 100 on the DXY.

Who could have seen this coming?

Mackie, what price did you pay?

Forget it Jess.  It's Central Banking.

Have a pleasant evening.

 

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - What Time's the Next Black Swan? - Down to Key Support

 

"The period of financial distress is a gradual decline after the peak of a speculative bubble that precedes the final and massive panic and crash, driven by the insiders having exited but the sucker outsiders hanging on hoping for a revival, but finally giving up in the final collapse."

Charles Kindleberger


"They run all away, and cry, 'the devil take the hindmost'."

Beaumont and Fletcher, Philaster, or Love Lies a-Bleeding


“It has been more profitable for us to bind together in the wrong direction than to be alone in the right one.  Those who have followed the assertive idiot rather than the introspective wise person have passed us some of their genes.  This is apparent from a social pathology: psychopaths rally followers.”

Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan
 

"Through a set of economic policies designed to bail out and subsidize failed and often tainted corporate enterprises, while actively promoting a false sense of confidence to support those policies, the public has become exposed, by those very people entrusted to protect them, to dangerously high levels of hidden counterparty risks. 

The cautionary functions of the media, the political class, and the regulatory bodies have been routinely directed, distorted, and even silenced for the benefit of a highly compromised and increasingly self-serving elite.  And this corruption has begun feeding on its own momentum, resulting in increasingly blatant examples of deception, distortion, and outright theft.  This is crony capitalism, and its deadly credibility trap." 

Jesse, April 2012

 

Stocks retraced the bounce from yesterday, but managed to hold at key support levels.

We may be one exogenous event away from a significant market dislocation.

Precipitous declines of 10+% are always lower probability events, but sometimes the tails are little fatter than at other times.

Gold and silver bounced.  Silver in particular was impressive since it diverged from stocks. 

The VIX fell.  

There is not panic selling yet.   I suspect the specs are buying the dips.

I came in short from last night and got a little shorter on the early bounce.   I trimmed back a bit for the weekend. 

If the major stock indices break below further key supports with the right kind of tension on the tape I will try to start calculating just what kind of decline we may be facing.  

The Fed is active in the markets.   But even they have a limited ability to respond to a significant event.

Stock index option expiration next Thursday.

As next week is Holy Week I will be posting but it may be late or abbreviated.

Have a pleasant weekend.