Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Let Them Live Again With Us in Love

 

"Strengthen the weak hands, and make firm the shaking knees.  Say to those who are of a fearful heart, ‘Be strong, do not fear!  Here is your God.   He will come with vengeance, with terrible judgement.  He will come and preserve you.’  Then the eyes of the blind shall be opened, and the ears of the deaf unstopped; then the lame shall leap like a deer, and the tongue of the speechless sing for joy.   For waters shall break forth in the wilderness, and streams in the desert; the burning sand shall become a pool, and the thirsty ground springs of water; in the haunts of jackals reeds and papyrus will grow."

Isaiah 35:3-7

"Christmas is more than a time of joy and gift-giving and receiving presents.   It is a time to recall our blessings and to gain strength in the grace of our friends and bosom of our families and loved ones.  And above all it is a time to remember that greatest, almost incomprehensible gift in all history, how our Lord made himself as us, as we are in our true selves, and came to us in the flesh, the incarnation of selfless love.

And thereby those who are no longer present in body at the Christmas hearth may still be there in spirit with us, as we will some day be with them.  Not bound up in crippling self-pity, not immobilized by faceless fear, not fleeting as a merely morose remembrance, but to be there vitally in our lives as our good angels, reminding us that the Christmas spirit is to be found, as Charles Dickens noted, in 'active usefulness, perseverance, cheerful discharge of duty, kindness and forbearance.'

This is how we may not only honor and cherish their memory, but actually let them live again in love with us.  What greater gift could we possibly desire to receive, than the ability to do good, to persevere in love, and to thereby live in the love of those for whom we care and who care for us, always?  That gift is there, if only we will not shut the door of our hearts, and be open to it."

Jesse, 16 December 2015

Trading will be light this week as the adults have already left for their vacations, and the juniors are manning the helm.

I'd expect the markets to have a little upward bias, and chopping sideways, with an eye toward any exogenous events.

Valuations are rich and we are in a narrow bubble once again.

The walking back of Powell's somewhat misleading verbiage of last week by various Fed hjeads is not being taken up by the Street.  It's not in their year end script.

Gold and silver had a little bounce higher, as the Dollar chopped sideways.

The narrative for the course of the US economy and Fed actions next year is a risible fairy tale.

Unless something notable happens I will not be posting anything tomorrow night.  I have some obligations in the late afternoon.

Have a pleasant evening.

The Christmas Ceasefire of 1914 - The Mark of Cain

 

"Late on Christmas Eve 1914, men of the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) heard German troops in the trenches opposite them singing carols and patriotic songs and saw lanterns and small fir trees along their trenches. Messages began to be shouted between the trenches.

The following day, British and German soldiers met in no man's land and exchanged gifts, took photographs and some played impromptu games of football. They also buried casualties and repaired trenches and dugouts. After Boxing Day, meetings in no man's land dwindled out.

The truce was not observed everywhere along the Western Front. Elsewhere the fighting continued and casualties did occur on Christmas Day. Some officers were unhappy at the truce and worried that it would undermine fighting spirit.  After 1914, the High Commands on both sides tried to prevent any truces on a similar scale happening again."

British Imperial War Museum, The True Story of the Christmas Truce

Even seemingly implacable foes, engaged in massive, bloody conflict, can pause from their deadly engagement and acknowledge their shared humanity, and honor the God whom they both worship, but in different languages and ways.  

And perhaps, even now, those engaged in deadly conflict might pause for a moment, at least, and stop the killing, and encouraging others to engage in senseless devastation, and feeding each other's children to Molech. 

And having paused to allow some relief and assistance to the wounded and homeless and captives,  and due respect and ceremony to the dead, may they turn back to the God of their fathers, and stop worshiping their profane idols of property, and hate, and worldly power. 

For this is the word of God.  And to harden your hearts against His ways, as the leaders of the great powers in 1914 had done, will bring on you and your children the curse of Cain, with all its madness and horrors, and years of devastation and sorrow.

'Today you are driving me from the land, and I will be hidden from your presence; I will be a restless wanderer on the earth, and whoever finds me will destroy me.'

You who drink of the foulness of the cup of the darkness of this world know it, in your heart of hearts.  This madness serves none but itself.

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - He Sets Before Us Life and Death

 

"Behold, today I set before you life and good, and death and evil.  If you obey the command that I give you, to love the Lord, your God, and to walk in his ways, and to observe his commandments, statutes, and decrees, then you will live and multiply, and the Lord, your God, will bless you in the land that you are entering to possess.

But if your hearts turn away so that you will not listen, and you are drawn away to worship other gods and to serve them then, as I pledge to you today, you will perish. You will not live a long time in the land that you are crossing over the Jordan to enter and to possess.

I call upon the heavens and the earth to witness that I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Choose life, so that you and your descendants might live."

Deuteronomy 30:15-19

"When the just flourish, the people rejoice;
       but when the wicked rule, the people groan."

Proverbs 29:2

"I am the Lord, your God
       who teaches you what is for your own good
       and who leads you in the way you should go.
If only you had listened to my commandments,
       your prosperity would have been like a river
       and your success like the waves of the sea.
Your descendants would have been as numerous as the sand
      and your offspring like its countless grains.
Their name would never be erased
       or blotted out from my sight."

Isaiah 48:17-19

It was a fairly quiet triple witch option expiration, perhaps so because all the fireworks had already taken place with so many economic events earlier this week and last.

Gold and silver were so steady in the early morning that I wondered if we should request a wellness visit for the Wall Street wiseguys.

But never fear, the Dollar rallied, and gold and silver retreated. 

Stocks also did a bit of reversal, with Big Tech leading a small rally higher, while the broader Russell 2000 slumped a bit.

Wash and rinse, fait accompli.

We'll always have next week.

Our hypocrisy seems to have no bounds.

Trading should be thinning out steadily now as we coast into the year end, and the holiday season.

But one always must keep an eye on exogenous events, too big to paper over.

Have a very pleasant weekend.

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Slouching Back to Babylon

 

"We live in an age when breaking the rules for personal profit, cheating if you will, and telling lies about it has become an accepted means of acting in public, quietly fashionable, almost admirable to some, provided that the lying is done skillfully, more as a distortion than an outright whopper, and with style.

What is truth? This could be the vulgar motto for the generation that is passing. Truth is whatever we say it is, and woe to any who dare to disagree with the lie, or bring any light to our fanciful imaginings.  The children of the darkness of this world will hate them for it.  For they are given over to greed and power, not truth."

Jesse, What Is Truth, 15 June 2016

“The more power a government has, the more it can act arbitrarily according to the whims and desires of the elite, the more it will make war on others and murder its foreign and domestic subjects.  And for the elite to sufficiently coalesce to commit itself to murdering its own citizens, there must be a near fanatical, driving interest.

Power can now achieve its potential.  Where also the elite have built up frustrations regarding those who have lost power or nonetheless feel threatened by them, where they see them as outside the moral universe, where they have dehumanized them, where the outgroup is culturally or ethnically distinct and the elite perceive them as inferior, or where any other such factors are present, Power will achieve its murderous potential.  It simply waits for an excuse, an event of some sort, an assassination, a massacre in a neighboring country, an attempted coup, a famine, or a natural disaster, that will justify beginning the murder en masse.

R. J. Rummel, Death By Government, 1994

“Religion used to be the opium of the people. To those suffering humiliation, pain, illness, and serfdom, religion promised the reward of an after life. But now, we are witnessing a transformation: a true opium of the people is the belief in nothingness after death, the huge solace, the huge comfort of thinking that for our betrayals, our greed, our cowardice, our murders, we are not going to be judged.”

Czeslaw Milosz, Discreet Charm of Nihilism

 

The equity rally fizzled in the big dogs, aka The Magnificent Seven of tech, grandchildren of the Nifty Fifty, but did spread to the lesser knowns of the Russell 2000.

Gold and silver rallied again, as the The Dollar weakened further.

Gold did give up quite a bit of its gain, but silver stood firm impressively.

VIX bounced a little but remains subdued.

Stock Index option expiration in a triple witch tomorrow.

At some point the most recent gold pool is going to collapse, and the metal may see $100+ rally days.

But until then we can only watch the elites attempting to breath some life back into an obvious equity bubble.

Is this for the year end, a traditional hand off to the bigger fools, or something presaging a miraculous 'soft landing' in which inflation subsides while the economy grows with vigor.

Will otherwise good, educated people throw away their morals, and join the forces of pillage and murder?

Be as mindful of your own soul as your coin purse and stock portfolio, for that is what this is all about.

Have a pleasant evening.