Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - The Witch of September - And Now Into the Season of Risk

 

“What we would like to do is change the world--make it a little simpler for people to feed, clothe, and shelter themselves as God intended them to do.  And, by fighting for better conditions, by crying out unceasingly for the rights of the workers, the poor, of the destitute--the rights of the worthy and the unworthy poor, in other words--we can, to a certain extent, change the world; we can work for the oasis, the little cell of joy and peace in a harried world.  We can throw our pebble in the pond and be confident that its ever widening circle will reach around the world.  There is nothing we can do but love, and, dear God, please enlarge our hearts to love each other, to love our neighbor, to love our enemy as our friend.” 

Dorothy Day 

 

"Do you desire to be great? make yourselves little.  If you minister to the humble and despised, if you feed the hungry, tend the sick, succour the distressed; if you bear with the froward, submit to insult, endure ingratitude, render good for evil, you are, as by a divine charm, getting power over the world and rising among the creatures. God has established this law. Thus He does His wonderful works. His instruments are poor and despised; the world hardly knows their names, or not at all. They are busied about what the world thinks petty actions, and no one minds them. They are apparently set on no great works; nothing is seen to come of what they do: they seem to fail. They rise by falling."

John Henry Newman 

 

The market seemed a bit nervy today, once again.  Almost skittish and easily provoked.

The stock indices all fell, and with some significance.  

And they ended the day near the lows.

But the VIX has yet to show any greater level of concern for risk among the traders.

Stocks are on a decent support level now, but any follow through action to the downside next week should be viewed with increasing caution for the potential for a greater decline. 

Gold finished just slightly lower.

Silver dropped a bit more in sympathy with stocks.

The miners were under pressure most of the day.

The Dollar finished higher taking back the 93 handle firmly.

I am all in cash now again.   I want to see more from this market before being willing to incur any risk.

I do not like trading when I am feeling off.  

The Fed seems to be caught up in a widening inquiry of questionable trading and conflicts of interest.

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

Have a pleasant weekend.

 

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Mini-Me - Fed Reform and Quad Witch Option Expiration

 

"A man who lies to himself is often the first to take offense. it sometimes feels very good to take offense, doesn't it?  And surely he knows that no one has offended him, and that he himself has invented the offense and told lies just for the beauty of it, that he has exaggerated for the sake of effect, that he has picked up on a word and made a mountain out of a pea--he knows all of that, and still he is the first to take offense, he likes feeling offended, it gives him great pleasure.” 

Fyodor Dostoevsky 

 

“The point of modern propaganda isn't only to misinform or push an agenda. It is to exhaust your critical thinking, to annihilate truth.” 

Garry Kasparov 

 

"Unhappiness comes to each of us because we think ourselves at the center of the world, because we have the miserable conviction the we alone suffer to the point of unbearable intensity."

Jacques Lusseyran

 

“The official philosophies of the totalitarian regimes unanimously brand as nonsensical the idea that there exists a single objective truth valid for everybody. The official philosophies of the totalitarian regimes deny the inherent value of thought.  For them thought is not a light but a weapon: its function, they say, is not to discover reality as it is, but to change and transform it with the purpose of leading us towards what is not.”

Alexandre Koyré 

 

Stocks took a fairly convincing swoon this morning, falling straight down to underlying support.

But mirabile dictu, equities regained most of their losses in the late afternoon and finished with a small loss.

The Dollar rallied up to just short of the 93 handle.

Gold and silver were whacked pretty convincingly along with most of the associated miners.

I was sitting all in cash, in part because I didn't like the feel of the market.  And I still don't.

I did buy a couple of small mining positions in the metals today, on the of chance this is just quad witch shenanigans and not the beginning of something more profoud.

Nice save on the stock indices into the close.  That made me doubt the sincerity of this market.

But you never know.

There will be a quad witch stock option expiration on Friday, the third of this year.

The banks must be restrained, the financial system reformed, and the economy brought back into balance, before there can be any sustained recovery. 

Given the extent of the corruption of the major monopolized industries and the political system by big money I am not optimistic about when meaningful reform will happen. 

Certainly not with the 'self-review' of the Fed's ethics that Chairman Powell has just proposed. 

The best way to manage a scandal in your own house is to lead the investigation of it.

But as Hermann Hesse once wrote, 'When the suffering becomes acute enough, one goes forward.'

Have a pleasant evening.

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Wash - Rinse - Repeat: The Wealth Transfer Machine

 

"The news reports of the stock trading by Fed Presidents rightfully caused outrage over the 'let them eat cake' attitude as thousands of businesses shut down, millions of workers lost their jobs and families struggled to pay their bills. By Thursday of last week, both Kaplan and Rosengren said they would sell all of their individual stock positions by the end of September. (File that under too little, too late.)

This level of arrogance on the part of two Fed Presidents is part of an overarching level of contempt for the sensibilities of the American people by the Federal Reserve over many decades." 

Pam and Russ Martens, Latest Fed Stock Trading Outrage Just the Tip of the Iceberg

 

"As everything in what used to be called creation becomes a commodity, human beings begin to look at one another, and at themselves, in a funny way, and they see price tags. There was a time when people spoke, at least occasionally, of 'inherent worth'— if not of things, then at least of persons." 

Harvey Cox, The Market as God 

 

"Poor people don't contribute to reelection funds, but those who profit from poor people sure do. Therefore, truth be told, most politicians couldn't care less about the plight of the poor. There's so much profit to be made from poor people - think payday loans, high-interest rent-to-own stores, for-profit colleges, and overpriced mobile homes - that politicians and their crony-capitalist donors have a vested interest in keeping them poor."

Joshua Wilkey, My Mother Wasn't White Trash

Stocks reversed their early losses and rallied 'solidly' into the afternoon and the close.

The spokesmodels for Wall Street were ebullient.

Gold and silver declined.

The Dollar was a bit lower.

The VIX declined.

There will be a quad option expiration on Friday.

Wash - rinse - repeat.

Have a pleasant evening.

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Storm Warnings - Quad Witch Stock Option Expiration on Friday

 

“They support freedom for themselves and slavery for everyone else, and they use the freedom of the market to disguise this.  Economic coercion is just a different form of force.”

Robert Peate 

 

“As long as there are crazed or crafty leaders to play on old fears, a mob will turn cruel.” 

Leigh Brackett 

 

“Instead of flooding the entire economy with liquidity, and thereby increasing the danger of inflation, the Fed could support the stock market directly by buying market averages in the futures market, thereby stabilizing the market as a whole.” 

 Robert Heller, Federal Reserve Board, 1989

 

“People with advantages are loathe to believe that they just happen to be people with advantages.  They come readily to define themselves as inherently worthy of what they possess; they come to believe themselves 'naturally' elite; and, in fact, to imagine their possessions and their privileges as natural extensions of their own elite selves.” 

C. Wright Mills, The Power Elite

Stocks were off again today.

The big cap techs in the NDX futures have now been lower for five straight days.

Gold and silver both rallied back a bit, but still lower after the recent bear raids.

The Dollar finished largely unchanged.

There will be a quad witch option expiration on Friday.

Have a pleasant evening.