Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - And So It Begins - Our Year of Living, Dangerously

 

"The impulse to freedom and democracy always seems weak and hopeless when matched against the forces of oppression, because aggressive oppression is always more single-minded, having already crushed internal dissent and perspective, and is generally better organized and equipped.

And yet even the greatest tyrannies have fallen, always. This is because they carry within themselves the seeds of their own renewal and return to balance, or utter destruction. Their strength is their weakness, in its overreach and self-absorption."

Jesse, 8 June 2012

"For they sanctify the power of markets in the name of economic efficiency, which requires the elimination of administrative or political barriers capable of inconveniencing the owners of capital in their individual quest for the maximisation of individual profit, which has been turned into a model of rationality.  And they preach the subordination of nation-states to the requirements of economic freedom for the masters of the economy, with the suppression of any regulation of any market, beginning with the labour market, the prohibition of deficits and inflation, the general privatisation of public services, and the reduction of public and social expenses."

Pierre Bourdieu, L'essence du néolibéralisme, Le Monde diplomatique, March 1998

“There is a mysterious cycle in human events. To some generations much is given.   Of other generations much is expected.   This generation of Americans has a rendezvous with destiny.

In this world of ours in other lands, there are some people, who, in times past, have lived and fought for freedom, and seem to have grown too weary to carry on the fight.   They have sold their heritage of freedom for the illusion of a living.   They have yielded their democracy. I believe in my heart that only our success can stir their ancient hope.  They begin to know that here in America we are waging a war against want and destitution and economic demoralization. It is more than that; it is a war for the survival of democracy.  We are fighting to save a great and precious form of government for ourselves and for the world.”

Franklin D. Roosevelt, 1936

"What then must we do?  We must give with love to whoever God has placed in our path.   Don't think about the major issues.  You do what you can about the misery in front of you.  You add your light to the sum of all light."

Billy Kwan from The Year of Living Dangerously, 1982


Stocks were down most of the day, but voilà, miraculously rallied to unchanged at the end in negligible volume. 

Gold and silver rallied a bit.

The Dollar decline a little.

The VIX was vixenish.

And so begins our year of living dangerously.

Have a pleasant weekend.

 

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - What Then Are We To Do? - The Wash and Rinse Continues

"The way we may be sure that we know him is to keep his commandments. Whoever says, “I know him,” but does not keep his commandments is a liar, and the truth is not in him.  But whoever keeps his word, the love of God is truly perfected in him.  This is the way we may know that we are in union with him: whoever claims to abide in him ought to live as he lived.

Beloved, I am writing no new commandment to you but an old commandment that you had from the beginning.  The old commandment is the word that you have heard.  And yet I do write a new commandment to you, which holds true in him and among you, for the darkness is passing away, and the true light is already shining.

Whoever says he is in the light, yet hates his brother, is still in the darkness.  Whoever loves his brother remains in the light, and there is nothing in him to cause a fall.  Whoever hates his brother is in darkness; he walks in darkness and does not know where he is going because the darkness has blinded his eyes."

1 John 2:3-11

‘Not everyone who says to me, 'Lord, Lord', will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only one who does the will of my Father in heaven.  On that day many will say to me, 'Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name, and cast out demons in your name, and accomplish great things in your name?'  Then I will declare to them, ''I do not know you.  Depart from me, you who practice lawlessness.'”

Matthew 7:21-23

"Be not deceived— God is not mocked.   Whatever a man sows, so shall he reap."

Galatians 6:7

"The blessed John the Evangelist lived in Ephesus until extreme old age. His disciples could barely carry him to church and he could not muster the voice to speak many words. During individual gatherings he usually said nothing but, 'Little children, love one another.'

The disciples and brothers in attendance, annoyed because they always heard the same words, finally said, 'Teacher, why do you always say this?' He replied with a line worthy of John: 'Because it is the Lord's commandment, and if it alone is kept, it is sufficient.'"

Jerome, Commentary on Galatians, 4th century


Financial people and economic ideas come and go, but the wash and rinse endures. 

Stocks rallied hard taking back yesterday's losses and then some.

Gold and silver rebounded as well.

The Dollar dropped.

Trading is light.

The transfer of wealth continues, the skim on the vitality of the nation.

The proxy wars between the principalities and powers continue.

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

In the end, that is all that really matters.

Have a pleasant evening.

 

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Life Imitates High School

 

"There never can have been, and never can be, and there never shall be any sin without pride.”

Augustine of Hippo

"God is light, and in him there is no darkness at all.  If we say, 'We have fellowship with him,' while we continue to walk in darkness, we lie and do not act in truth.  But if we walk in the light as he is in the light, then we have fellowship with one another, and the Blood of his Son Jesus cleanses us from all sin.

If we say, 'We are without sin,' we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us.  If we acknowledge our sins, he is faithful and just and will forgive our sins and cleanse us from every wrongdoing.  If we say, 'We have not sinned,” we make him a liar, and his word is not in us.'"

1 John 1:5-10

"Moloch: any cause to which a dreadful sacrifice is made or destruction is due."

Chambers Dictionary

"The most `worldly' society I have ever lived in is that of schoolboys: most worldly in the cruelty and arrogance of the strong, the toadyism and mutual treachery of the weak, and the unqualified snobbery of both.  Nothing was so base that most members of the school proletariat would not do it, or suffer it, to win the favour of he school aristocracy: hardly any injustice too bad for the aristocracy to practice."

C. S. Lewis

"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 traded weakly and went out on the lows.

Gold and silver edged lower.

Gold remains in a trading range and potential flag formation.

The Dollar edged higher.

Perhaps we will see more games and tax loss selling this week.

Have a pleasant evening.

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Risks and Rewards

 

“And for a moment it seemed to me as if I also were buried in a vast grave full of unspeakable secrets.”

Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness


"What Taleb is basically saying is that a system or investment that is designed to accommodate infrequent but outsized and somewhat unpredictable risks performs one way he calls anti-fragile.  And other systems and investments are designed so that they perform well under 'normal conditions' but tend to underperform, and often badly, during the unexpected.

If you want to grossly oversimplify this principle, and remember it as a saying, pick the right tool for the right job, and remember that nothing comes for free.  I used this in describing tradeoffs in very complex products and networks, and while it may sound tritely obvious, it worked with a lot of upper level executives. (some of whom tended toward the trite and obvious lol)

But what is the job itself?  Well, the application defines it of course.  But one must also take performance criteria into account, and with performance there are environmental conditions and variabilities.  Would you like to have a network that can function for your casual use in your home, or a high performance network that can survive arctic cold and desert heat?

But you don't want to waste money and over engineer something either.  That is a good way to go broke.  One needs to understand expected performance, and the risk profiles for just about anything that is not merely incidental.

And if there is anything that I wish you to remember from this blog, after all these years, it is the deadly trap of undisclosed risks and the tendency of some to understate those risks for their own short term advantages. And how other people will go along with them for the sake of position, power, and prestige.  In a nutshell, this is the story of our recent financial crises.

There was a movement in finance to force normal distributions onto data that did not really justify it.  In order to achieve this, the risk models made certain assumptions, and thereby 'flattened' reality in order to fit the model.  What one ended up with was a mis-estimation (too frequently willful and self-serving) of the risk probabilities. And so we saw 'once in a hundred year events' happening with alarming frequency, despite the best efforts of the financial planners to smooth them over with piles of bailout money...

And sad to say, for most people, their major task is just getting by day to day. And so the pros and cons of various investment techniques is so much hoohah because their most ambitious aspiration is to stay out of debt, especially usurious and fee laden debts, while putting a little bit aside. And this is why I spend quite a bit of time writing about these abuses, because I am not only a caterer to the elite, but to our little community which has a range of wonderful souls in it."

Jesse, Investment and Insurance: Prospective Risk and Return in Various Precious Metal Investments, 7 February 2014

You could just boil it all down to 'hope for the best but prepare for the worst.'   But that tends to squeeze out the notion of differentiation.

I suspect forward earnings are going to be a bit grim, no matter what else may happen in our financial Disneyland, and what fabulous tales that some might pour forth.

But we will still get soaring rallies on some transient piece of data, and some altered perception of what the Fed may or may not be doing to promote or sustain another financial bubble.

So we can expect volatility and much of it may not make sense, but against a fairly mediocre background.

Wash-rinse-repeat, instead of the fairly steady upward drift of a bull bubble market.

Unfortunately, we are in the aftermath of another financial asset bubble, again.  Third time since 2000.

At their heart, financial asset bubbles are Ponzi schemes, and spawn a number of related Ponzi schemes as well.  

Call it a culture of the willful corruption of judgement for personal gain, if you will.

It shapes systems.  It bends the rule of law. It grows from a cottage industry to becomes a major export.

Stocks traded weakly again today.

Gold and silver rallied hard early on, but then fell back during the daily grind, but still managed to hold on to some of their gains.

Gold is stuck in an obvious range, and it could be a potential bear flag.  It depends on how it breaks.

No one of us can really predict it with any certainty, but we can calculate how to tell what is happening and what our reaction ought to be to it.

But there will be plenty of predictions, and the misses will be quickly forgotten, and the wins, as few as they may be, will be carved in marble.

Or we can just throw down and gamble.   And there is a place for that, albeit a measured one, if you want to stay in the nicer neighborhoods.

Most people lie to themselves, which is a complicating factor.

This will be a quiet week.

January could be quite telling for 2023.

Have a pleasant evening.