Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - The Wrath of the Lamb - Option Expiration

 

“Prepare for great battles. Know that you are now on a great stage where all heaven and earth are watching you. Fight like a knight, so that He can reward you. Do not be unduly fearful, because you are not alone.

Before I come as a just Judge, I will first open wide the door of My mercy. Those who refuse to pass through the door of My mercy must pass through the door of My justice.”

Maria Faustina Kowalska, Divine Mercy in My Soul

"Despite knowing of God, they refused to honor him as God, or give Him thanks. As a result, they became vain in their thinking, and their uncomprehending hearts became hardened."

Romans 1:21

“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, it is a turning of our gaze in the wrong direction. Human beings are so made that the ones who do the crushing feel nothing; it is the person crushed who feels what is happening. Unless one has placed oneself on the side of the oppressed, to feel with them, one cannot understand. Power is as pitiless to the man who possesses it, or thinks he does, as it is to its victims; the latter it crushes, the former it intoxicates. The truth is, no one really possesses it."

Simone Weil, War and the Iliad, 1939

"All the world marveled at this, and gave their allegiance to the Beast. And they worshiped the dragon for giving such power to him. as they also worshiped the Beast. 'Who is as great as the Beast?' they exclaimed. 'And who is able to resist him?' And the Beast was allowed to commit great blasphemies against God, and to exercise its authority for forty-two months."

Revelation 13:3-5

"When a society fails to restrain the worst behaviours of those who prey on others through the abuse of power or money, their example brings out the worst in a much larger subset of the population. This is why romantic notions about markets and societies without law and transparent regulation are so harmful. They turn the power of the markets and the laws over to the least scrupulous and self-controlled in a society. This is why any social system without checks and balances, without transparency and restraints, will eventually deteriorate into a dysfunctional system of self-interest and looting."

Jesse, Without Empathy or Remorse, 13 August 2016

"The kings of the earth, the nobles, the military officers, the rich, the powerful, and every slave and free person hid themselves in caves and among mountain crags.  They cried out to the mountains and the rocks, 'Fall on us and hide us from the face of the one who sits on the throne and from the wrath of the Lamb, because the great day of their judgement has come, and who can stand against it?”

Revelation 6:15-17

"The most important problem in the world today is your soul, for that is what the struggle is about."

Fulton J. Sheen


I have an appointment at 4:45 so no commentary tonight, just charts.  

There will be a stock option expiration tomorrow. 

March is a triple witch occasion as I recall.

And a cautionary word, about the things that matter the most.

Have a pleasant evening.

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - The Lords of Madness, Bribery and Blackmail

 

“Americans had built themselves a world of speculative pipe dreams. That world was inhabited, not by people who had to be convinced, but by people who sought excuses for believing.”

John Kenneth Galbraith, The New Industrial State, 1967

“Just as it was in the days of Noah, so will it be with the coming of the Son of Man. People were eating, drinking, marrying and being given away in marriage, up until the very day that Noah entered the ark. Then the flood came, and swept them all away. And they said to him, 'Where will this happen, Lord?' And He said to them, 'Where death is, there a gathering of vultures will be.'”

Luke 17:26-27, 37

"One reason we rush so quickly to the vulgar satisfactions of judgment, and love to revel in our righteous outrage, is that it spares us from the impotent pain of empathy, and the harder, messier work of understanding.  These are people who have been vigilantly on the lookout for something to be offended by, and found it.

Quite a lot of what passes itself off as dialogue about our society consists of people trying to justify their own (selfish) choices.  Let me propose that if your beliefs or convictions matter more to you than people—if they require you to act as though you were a worse person than you are—you may have lost perspective."

Timothy Kreider, We Learn Nothing, June 2012

"‘Woe to you, you hypocrites! You are like whitewashed tombs, which look beautiful on the outside, but on the inside are full of the bones of the dead and everything unclean. On the outside you appear righteous, but on the inside you are full of hypocrisy and wickedness. You snakes, you brood of vipers.'"

Matthew 23:23-33

"Financial Predators, on the other hand, are usually narcissistic and audacious criminals. They regularly have an extreme sense of entitlement coupled with high self-efficacy. Many of them have a charismatic quality and are preternaturally persuasive. Financial Predators are commonly shameless and quite adept serial liars. They perceive themselves having near unlimited guile and resourcefulness to extricate themselves out of any compromising situations."

Russ Alan Prince, Unmasking Financial Predators, Forbes 2017

"There are so many ways of escaping from that which one fears, and not the least of these is hatred.”

Philip Kerr, Berlin Noir


The American oligarchy of money and power is becoming increasingly audacious.

By audacious is meant that it operates more openly, more brazenly, and more lawlessly, using force and fraud, bribery and blackmail, to achieve its own selfish objectives.

They are able to bend US foreign and domestic policy of the country to their will in ways that seem almost baffling and self-destructive to the casual, non-partisan observer.   

These are the ways of the madness possessing the minds of those who serve it.

Stocks rolled higher today since the Fed did not do or say anything untoward to spoil the party.

VIX of course fell.

Gold soared as the reality of the opera buffa in the halls of power and money is increasingly exposed for the farce without a sustainable foundation that it is becoming.

Silver took it on the chin for whatever reason, probably related to the goon squad of financial interests that run the US markets and the lack of international challengers in the markets that gold seems to energize.

This is going to end badly.   And they do not care.

I have had an abiding feeling that an object lesson in consequence is forthcoming.  How we will react to it will determine our near term future.

Many other nations have stood in such situations before, and not so long ago that we cannot remember.

Have a pleasant evening.

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Mother of Harlots and Abominations

 

"None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free."

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Die Wahlverwandtschaften, 1809

"And where is the magnificent Emperor Nero now, ubi sunt, immortal god and lord of the world, but a memory, returned to the earth and dust, to live no more.  Perhaps he is now to be found only as a bit of dirt beneath the fingernails of some little child, to be plucked out and thrown away with a 'tut tut' by a doting mother.

The glory that was Greece, the grandeur that was Rome.  And so the mighty rise and are fallen, but the Word and the Spirit endure."

Jesse, The Word and the Spirit Endure, 18 March 2016

"Legitimate power always includes attentiveness to justice.  When power is not attentive to justice it cannot endure.  This is a summons to us to keep the agenda of justice for the vulnerable alive and front and center to maintain a kind of subversive stance toward power.

Early on in the gospel traditions, the power elite in Jesus’ society who were colluding with the Roman Empire, recognized him as a threat and began to conspire to kill him.  I think he was presented in the gospel narratives as being a huge threat to the established order of the Roman Empire... Jesus became a reference point for much of the hostility and resistance to the power of the empire because he refused to accommodate it, and told another story of reality that the empire could not co-opt.

The market ideology is now the new form of imperial power and many of us, without any critical reflection, have signed onto that and organized our lives in that way so we do not have any time, energy or capacity for the things that are rightly important to us."

Walter Brueggemann, Speak Truth to Power, June 26, 2014

“'The woman was arrayed in purple and scarlet, adorned with riches, holding in her hand a golden cup full of idolatry and the impurities of her lawlessness; and on her forehead was written a name of mystery: 'Babylon the great, mother of harlots and of earth’s abominations.'"

Revelation 17:4-6

"For the mystery of lawlessness is already at work.  But the one who now restrains it will continue to do so until he is taken away.  And then the lawless one will be revealed, whom the Lord will slay by the breath of his mouth, and bring it to an end with the splendor of his coming.  

The coming lawlessness will be the work of Satan made manifest in all power and false signs and wonders, and in every wicked deception for those perishing because they refused to love the truth to be saved.  For this reason, God permits them a powerful delusion to believe their lies, that all may be condemned who deny the truth and instead take pleasure in lawlessness." 

2 Thessalonians 2:7-12

Stocks dumped today, as the wash and rinse continues, to the tune of mispriced risks and war drums.

Gold and silver soared, with the silver futures contract tagging 35 intraday.

Gold has clearly broken out, and set a new all time high.

There is no gold kilo report from Hong Kong, because the CME has decided that they had to close shop and leave town.   Too physical for their papery tastes it seems.

VIX kicked back up a bit.

The Dollar continued to decline.

Tomorrow there will be an FOMC meeting with the usual press conference with Chairman Jay to follow.

The outlook is cloudy, with a chance of shenanigans.

I came in fairly short this morning, and then closed them out as the morning decline seemed to wane.  I went into the close flat, no positions short term, and will wait to see what happens tomorrow.

Have a pleasant evening.

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - CME Discontinuing a Number of Gold Contracts

 

I was out and about most of the day.

Just charts tonight.

I will note that there was no update on the physical gold in CME associated warehouses in Hong Kong.

You may have seen the notice that CME is discontinuing a number of gold contracts including their gold kilo contracts.

Effective immediately, Commodity Exchange, Inc. (“COMEX” or “Exchange”) delisted the Gold Kilo Futures, London Spot Gold Futures, London Silver Spot Futures, and Cleared OTC London Gold Forwards (collateral margin) contracts...  As a result of the delisting, information regarding the Contracts has been deleted from the CME Group website.

Are they no longer able to keep up with the offtake of gold there?

This strategic retreat is one way to avoid the soft default of a 'failure to deliver.'

Curiouser and curiouser.

Have a pleasant evening.