Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Principalities and Powers

"Surely, there is at this day a confederacy of evil, marshaling its hosts from all parts of the world, organizing itself, taking its measures, enclosing the church of Christ as in a net, and preparing the way for a general apostasy from it.  Whether this very apostasy is to give birth to Antichrist, or whether he is still to be delayed, we cannot know; but at any rate this apostasy, and all its tokens, and instruments, are of the Evil One and savor of death.

Far be it from any of us to be of those simple ones, who are taken in that snare which is circling around us!  Far be it from us to be seduced with the fair promises in which Satan is sure to hide his poison...

He prompts you what to say, and then listens to you, and praises you, and encourages you.  He bids you mount aloft.  He shows you how to become as gods.  Then he laughs and jokes with you, and gets intimate with you; he takes your hand, and gets his fingers between yours, and grasps them, and then you are his."

J.H.Newman, The Times of Antichrist


"Be sober, be vigilant. Your adversary, the devil, prowls the earth like a roaring lion, seeking those whom he may devour."

1 Peter 5:8


"But the Lord stood by me, and strengthened me, so that the message might be fully proclaimed that all the Gentiles might hear.  And I was delivered out of the lion's mouth."

2 Timothy 4:17


"For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities and powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places."

Ephesians 6:12

The option expiration on the Comex passed, with an undeniable flight to safety underway, as North Korea provocatively launched a missile over their traditional foe and US ally, the island nation of Japan.

Today the holders of the new contracts for those whose call options expired in the money were given the opportunity and perhaps some incentive to cash them in.  As I had said this is more of an issue for silver for the September contract holders than for gold.

The divergence between the quoted Kitco 'spot' gold price and the US futures continuous contract continues as I have previously noted.  This is because of the weight of the December contract in gold, and the method by which the 'spot' price is derived.  I mention this only to account for the slight price discrepancy you may find in my chart.

And so we see that gold has broken out, and set a new high for 2017.  The trick will be to hold this breakout level through the upcoming Non-Farm Payrolls report this Friday.  Not that the report will be of any particular significance, although much may or may not be made of it.  Rather, it is a cue to the price manipulators that they may have an opportunity to take the tourist investor to the cleaners for a quick wash and rinse, in one direction or another.

The queen abides.  She is only lightly responding to outside stimulus.  I suspect that she is being caught up already in the contemplation of eternity.  And after all, at that enormity, that overwhelming significance of all existence, what else matters?  The closing price of Apple?

People are so foolish.  They think they are winning, when they no longer even understand the nature of the game that they are playing.

In the end, the only real tragedy is not to have been a saint.

Have a pleasant evening.

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Non-Farm Payrolls and Comex Option Expiration Next Week

“We have been called to heal wounds, to unite what has fallen apart, and to bring home those who have lost their way.”

Francis of Assisi

There will be an option expiration on the Comex tomorrow, August 28th for the September contracts for gold and silver.

Silver is a more significantly active metal in the September contract.   The focus in gold trading now has shifted to October and December.

Gold is jammed into resistance at the $1300 level as can easily be seen in the price chart below.

There will be a Non-Farm Payrolls Report for the month of August on Friday, September 8.

Please remember the people of Texas who are suffering the adverse effects of a hurricane with very heavy flooding.

My son returned a week early from his Summer internship in Texas at my request. I was suddenly concerned about the queen and asked him to come home. His manager was very accommodating given the circumstances, and he drove back over a three day period. In doing so he missed all of the bad weather there, for which I am grateful.

The queen abides, growing quieter, and steadily a bit weaker, sleeping most of the time with Dolly at her side. I measure out the hours with patches and syringes, a tender touch of caring and a reassuring word, as I obtain similar consolations from my own angels of the moment, who bring a meal and a helping hand.

There is little fear and no pain. It is like watching a butterfly becoming.  God is making an angel.

These are His tender mercies.

Have a pleasant week ahead.   Hope to see you tomorrow.

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Coiling

“The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.”

Milan Kundera


“We cannot understand Fascism, but we can and must understand from where it springs, and we must be on our guard...because what happened can happen agai. For this reason, it is everyone's duty to reflect on what happened."

Primo Levi


"The inability to identify with others was unquestionably the most important psychological condition for the fact that something like Auschwitz could have occurred in the midst of more or less civilized and innocent people.

What is called 'fellow traveling' [collaboration] was primarily business interest: one pursues one’s own advantage before all else and, simply not to endanger oneself, does not talk too much. That is a general law of the status quo."

Theodor Adorno


"The perpetrators were scholars, doctors, nurses, justice officials, the police and the health and workers’ administration.   The victims were poor, desperate, rebellious or in need of help. They came from psychiatric clinics and childrens hospitals, from old age homes and welfare institutions, from military hospitals and internment camps."

Commemorative Tablet at Tiergartenstraße 4, Berlin


"Through his first year in Germany [1933], Dodd had been struck again and again by the strange indifference to atrocity that had settled over the nation, the willingness of the populace and the moderate elements in the government to accept each new oppressive decree, each new act of violence, without protest. Dodd continued to hope that the murders would so outrage the German public that the [Hitler] regime would fall, but as the days passed he saw no evidence of any such outpouring of anger.

This lack of reaction arose partly because many in Germany and elsewhere chose to believe Hitler's claim that he had suppressed an imminent rebellion that would have caused far more bloodshed.   Evidence soon emerged, however, that showed that in fact Hitler's account was false.

The controlled press, not surprisingly, praised Hitler for his decisive behaviour. In a letter to Hull, Dodd forecast an even more terroristic regime. 'The people hardly notice this complete coup d'etat. It takes place in silence. I would swear that millions upon millions have no idea what a monstrous thing has occurred.'"

Erik Larson, The Garden of Beasts


"Communism and fascism or naziism, although poles apart in their intellectual content, are similar in this, that both have emotional appeal to the type of personality that takes pleasure in being submerged in a mass movement and submitting to superior authority."

James A. C. Brown


"There is a lack of critical assessment of the past. But you have to understand that the current ruling elite is actually the old ruling elite. So they are incapable of a self-critical approach to the past."

Ryszard Kapuscinski


"The history of man is the history of crimes, and history can repeat. So information is a defense. Through this we can build, we must build, a defense against repetition. There is no denying that Hitler and Stalin are alive today. They are waiting for us to forget, because this is what makes possible the resurrection of these two monsters."

Simon Wiesenthal

Gold in particular is coiling, tighter and tighter.

It was hard to tell if the bounce in stocks today was something meaningful, a last ditch attempt to stave off a selling wave, or something else.

History seems to be coiling for a move, tighter and tighter, as well.

Have a pleasant evening.

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - A Rendezvous with Destiny

"The Unspeakable.  What is this?  Surely, an eschatological image.  It is the void that we encounter, you and I, underlying the announced programs, the good intentions, the unexampled and universal aspirations for the best of all possible worlds.

It is the void that contradicts everything that is spoken even before the words are said; the void that gets into the language of public and official declarations at the very moment when they are pronounced, and makes them ring dead with the hollowness of the abyss.  It is the void out of which Eichmann drew the punctilious exactitude of his obedience..."

Thomas Merton, Raids on the Unspeakable

Gold, represented below as the continuous futures contract, is bouncing just below the big resistance at 1300.

The reason that the 'spot' prices quoted by sites such as Kitco are lower is that they are discounting the December contract back to August.

The spot price is really a derivative of the Comex futures market, calculated in much the same manner as 'fair value' is calculated from the SP 500 futures front month contract.  Most people are surprised to find this out.  The paper market really does direct the retail physical market.

If we get a clean break of 1300 higher, it might be difficult for the wiseguys to keep it under control. That is the crux of the matter.

And if we fail to break out, we can always go back down to the bottom of the trend channel.

Stocks are wobbly. This is of growing concern to the powers that be.

The demi-gods like anything that they can create almost at will:  stock certificates, paper money, paper gold, complex derivatives.

Let's see how long these jokers can keep treading water.

Have a pleasant evening.

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Essere Umano - Being Human

"What has become of King Don Juan?
And the Princes of Aragon,
What has become of any of them?
What remains of our handsome nobility?
And of the many fads and fashions
They brought with them?
What remains of their jousts and tournaments,
Gilded ornamentations, fancy embroideries
And feathered tops?
Was all this insignificant waste?
Was it anything but a season's fleeting touch of green on the fields?"

Jorge Manrique


"To some who were confident of their own righteousness and achievements, and also looked down upon and despised others who were less accomplished, Jesus told this parable: ‘Two men went up to the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector. The Pharisee stood by himself and prayed: ''God, I thank you that I am not like other people – robbers, evildoers, adulterers – or even like this tax collector. I fast twice a week and give a tenth of all I get.''

‘But the tax collector stood at a distance. He would not even look up to heaven, but beat his breast and said, “God, have mercy on me, a sinner.”

‘I tell you that this man, rather than the other, went home justified before God. For all those who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted.’"

Luke 18:9-14

Pride, intended as a recognition of our achievements and superiority, ironically diminishes our fullness as human beings, and often quite dramatically so.   Pride can make people act in ways that, from a distance, seem very pompous and silly.

And among these proud ones there are often those who not only go beyond a simple agnosticism and indifference to the vastness of creation, but actively refuse to acknowledge anything greater than themselves.  And they do so almost with a kind of fervor, aggressively despising any forms of observance among others as a weakness of mind and character.

Worldly pride is easier for us to perceive.  We see it clearly in the self-proclaimed elite of our time.   But less obvious perhaps is the spiritual form of pride, that reduces us into an insidiously distorted order of things. Spiritual pride blinds us to our own faults. But even worse, it leads us to magnify and fix ourselves upon the faults of others.

In doing so we seek to magnify our own imagined achievements, and at the same time dismiss our bad treatment and low regard for others. There is no person who is spiritually proud whose heart will serve as a home for the Holy Spirit, the spirit of humility, and mercy, and of love. They are too full of the law, and of judgement, and the trappings and ornaments of worldly observance, and of themselves.

Spiritual pride leads to a lingering spiritual death. It turns the living being into a living tomb, all bright and polished on the outside, proudly ornamented with scrupulous attention to detail, and ostentatious adherence to the letter of the law— but inside full of corruption, and festering foulness. This is all too common among those whose love is directed to the rituals and the forms of religion, but wanting nothing to do with the human realities of it, the acts of mercy to others which are the second great commandment. It is a sickening romance with the self, unto death.

But Jesse, isn't this just what it means to be human?   If Mother Teresa had decided to heck with the poor and the dying, and run off to join a reality cooking show in Hollywood, to seek her own fame and fortune, wouldn't that only be human?

No.  There is a difference is between the things that people may do that are beneath their calling to be fully human, and what they do that strives to achieve the fullness of their humanity.  It is the general lack of moral aspiration and the glorification of that perversion of individuality which is selfishness that marks our generation, as it has done so many times in the past.  It distorts our vision, and makes the saints incomprehensible, laughable, almost repulsive and contemptible to us.   And it is a sickness, unto the lingering death of a soul and of a society.

Gold tried to break out above 1300 on Friday and was turned back toward support.

Stocks had a 'dead cat bounce' on the Friday option expiry after the big decline of the day before.

See you next week.