Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - For Those Who Are Wounded, and Have Lost Their Way

 

“To love at all is to be vulnerable.   Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken.   If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal.   Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements.  Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness.  But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change.  It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable.  To love is to be vulnerable.”

C.S. Lewis

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

Blessed are they who love their brothers and sisters as much when they are sick, as when they are well and of service. 

I have been all things unholy. If God can work through me, He can work through anyone.

Keep a clear eye toward life's end. And remember that when you leave this earth, you can take nothing that you have received, but only what you have given.”

Francis of Assisi, Fioretti di San Francesco

“Man has places in his heart which do not yet exist— and into them enters suffering, in order that they may have life.”

Léon Bloy

Stocks ranged back and forth in a volatile day, finishing largely where they started.

Dare I suggest that the market is antsy waiting for the Payrolls Report on Friday?

But there is always time for a wash and rinse or two, and a few Banks and hedge funds can bang stocks prices around as they will in light volumes and tight trading.

Gold and silver rallied fairly well early on but were hammered back down quite firmly into the close.

The Dollar gained back the 106 handle later in the day.

Daisy received a thorough examination at our vet today, and it was sad to see the full extent of the profound neglect and misuse she has suffered in her life before she was tossed on the streets.

We will love her, and do right by her, one day at a time.  And thereby we ourselves in turn will be healed.

Have a pleasant evening.

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Without Regard, Restraint or Remorse - Nothing Exceptional Here

 

"The wicked encourage and give themselves the license to attempt and commit all manner of transgressions, seeing that the fruit which injustice yields is soon ripe, and offers itself easily to the gatherer’s hand.   Punishment comes late, lagging long behind the pleasure of enjoyment."

Plutarch

“Happiness is love’s outcome, never its motive. Love is not concerned with a person’s accomplishments, it is a response to a person’s being.  Where someone is loved they are an end in themselves, and certainly not a means toward something else.  It is therefore of love’s essence, wherever it is found, that the loved one seem precious, beautiful, and worthy of love."

Dietrich von Hildebrand, The Art of Living

"Give me the money that has been spent in war and I will clothe every man, woman, and child in an attire of which kings and queens will be proud.  I will build a schoolhouse in every valley over the whole earth.  I will crown every hillside with a place of worship consecrated to peace."

Charles Sumner

"I know nothing that I may say can influence you. You have no souls to be influenced. You are spineless, flaccid things. You pompously call yourselves Republicans and Democrats. There is no Republican Party. There is no Democratic Party. There are no Republicans nor Democrats in this House. You are lick-spittles and panderers, the creatures of the plutocracy.”

Jack London, The Iron Heel

Stocks were down hard on the early trade, but managed to wallow their way back to almost unchanged during the day.

The Dollar dropped again.

Gold and managed to hold their own, and even gain a bit.

VIX ticked slightly higher.

The markets seem to be digesting their gorging on risk in July.

Non-farm payrolls on Friday.

We adopted a new dog this weekend, a little shih tzu that had been found as a stray on the streets in Newark and was rescued by a group of wonderful, caring people.  

She had a number of serious health problems which have been largely overcome, and as she is young at three, she has a good chance at a long and happy life.

Tomorrow begins the next phase of her road to full recovery with a visit to our own vets.

We are surrounding her with patience, care, and love. 

You can tell she is frightened but wants to be accepted.  It takes time.

The young man is beaming again.

Daisy and I abide.

Have a pleasant evening.

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - The Long Goodbye - Payrolls Next Week

 

"There is no clean way to make a hundred million bucks.  Somewhere along the line guys got pushed to the wall, nice little businesses got the ground cut out from under them.  Decent people lost their jobs.  Big money is big power, and big power gets used wrong.  It's the system.  The tragedy of life, Howard, is not that the beautiful die young, but that they grow old and mean."

Raymond Chandler, The Long Goodbye

“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

"One of the most disturbing facts that came out in the Eichmann trial was that a psychiatrist examined him and pronounced him perfectly sane.  If all the Nazis had been psychotics, as some of their leaders probably were, their appalling cruelty would have been in some sense easier to understand.  It is much worse to consider this calm, 'well-balanced,' unperturbed official conscientiously going about his desk work, his administrative job which happened to be the supervision of mass murder.   He was thoughtful, orderly, unimaginative.   He had a profound respect for system.

The' sanity' of Eichmann is disturbing.  We equate sanity with a sense of justice, with humaneness, with prudence, with the capacity to love and understand other people.   We rely on the sane people of the world to preserve it from barbarism, madness, destruction.   And now it begins to dawn on us that it is precisely the sane ones who are the most dangerous.  The whole concept of sanity in a society where spiritual values have lost their meaning is itself meaningless."

Thomas Merton, Raids on the Unspeakable

"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."

Theodor Adorno

 

And so we say goodbye to July.

Non-Farm Payrolls next week.

Gold and silver rebounded strongly from the recent battering they took from a gauntlet of gameable events.

Stocks have rebound sharply from oversold, and may be completing a bear market rally.

Or perhaps we have reached a bottom of sorts.

I doubt it, but I could be wrong.

The Dollar continued to slide on expectations of the grand pivot.

A few videos at the bottom.  

Old and new, hot and cool.

Have a pleasant weekend.