13 April 2017

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Risk Off - Maundy Thursday


"Jesus stood up from the meal, took off his outer clothing, and wrapped a towel round his waist. After that, he poured water into a basin and began to wash his disciples’ feet, drying them with the towel that was wrapped round him.

He came to Simon Peter, who said to him, ‘Lord, are you going to wash my feet?’

Jesus replied, ‘You do not realise now what I am doing, but later you will understand.’

‘No,’ said Peter, ‘you shall never wash my feet.’

Jesus answered, ‘Unless I wash you, you have no part with me.’

‘Then, Lord,’ Simon Peter replied, ‘not just my feet but my hands and my head as well!’

When he had finished washing their feet, he put on his clothes and returned to his place. ‘Do you understand what I have done for you?’ he asked them. ‘You call me Teacher and Lord, and rightly so, for that is what I am. Now that I, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also should wash one another’s feet. I have set you an example that you should do as I have done for you.

A new commandment I give you: that you love one another, as I have loved you. By this all will know that you are mine— if you have love for one another.'”

John 13


"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 to a certain extent, by fighting for better conditions, by crying out unceasingly for the rights of the workers, of 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."

Dorothy Day, June 1946

Today was a 'risk off' day in the markets.

Some of this was due to geopolitical risks.

The rest was in anticipation of a three day weekend, with new political and geopolitical risks being anticipated.

The US government, specifically the Congress, has to renew the debt ceiling, and despite being controlled by one party it remains dysfunctional, being sharply divided by ideologues and servants of various corporate interests and a wealthy few who do not carry the needs and best outcomes for the people or the nation in their hearts.   And as for the corporate powers, they serve only their own greed, which is mammon.

Few suffering servants in power these days; they serve what they love the most, a false vision of god as themselves, which is death. It would be far better for them if they had never been born.

Gold and silver remain jammed into key resistance, and both of the major stock indices which I track here closed down to key support.

VIX, the measure of risk and volatility, has ticked up to a new short term high.

Let's see if we can come out of this weekend blithely, and reverse these trends next week. Or on the other hand, confirm these trends with breakouts and breakdowns as the mispricing of risk that began with the Trump ascendancy starts to unwind.

This is Holy Week for us. And so I will likely not post anything tomorrow, but perhaps some little things over the weekend. I spent much of today taking care of the queen, who is very fatigued and forgetful because of her illness. I managed to do all her laundry which was a major milestone. She was too tired to object, because I won't 'do it the right way.' lol.

Have a pleasant weekend.




12 April 2017

Stocks and Precious Metals - Abide


Gold and silver had a very good follow through on the rally yesterday, going out on the highs even into the after hours trade.

Gold is around 1283 and silver 18.50. A weaker dollar helped, in addition to strong physical buying from India for the festival and wedding seasons.

Stocks were off a bit and the VIX ticked higher, in line with a 'risk off' day that was propelling the safe haven trade in the precious metals.

I see that the Kitco precious metals ticker on the left has been lagging updates badly.  I don't know what their problem may be, but I moved that ticker below the two from Nick Laird which while they show the five day price trend also show the most recent price and time for each metal.

While they are showing some good strength, the metals need to keep moving to set the higher highs that may persuade the markets in general that their long sideways consolidation trend is over.

It appears that we will have a very early treatment slot at hospital every day for the next three weeks, so I will be around most afternoons.   I am not going to promise to stay awake.  lol

Let's see how the trading goes tomorrow.

Have a pleasant evening.




11 April 2017

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - I See Them Long Hard Times To Come


"Governments can err, Presidents do make mistakes, but the immortal Dante tells us that divine justice weighs the sins of the cold-blooded and the sins of the warm-hearted on different scales. Better the occasional faults of a Government that lives in a spirit of charity, than the constant omission of a Government frozen in the ice of its own indifference."

Franklin D. Roosevelt

Today was a 'risk off' day, although stocks managed to take back much of their losses after the European close.

Gold and silver went out near their highs.

The precious metals are jammed up against overhead resistance.

A breakout from here and a strong closing print that sticks it the breakout and confirms it opens up some interesting possibilities.

Have a pleasant evening.





10 April 2017

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Freedom


“The world says: 'You have needs— satisfy them. You have as much right to it as the rich and the mighty. Do not hesitate to satisfy your needs; indeed, expand your needs and demand more.' This is the worldly doctrine of today.

And they believe that this is freedom. The result for the rich is isolation and suicide, and for the poor, envy and murder.”

Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

The marketeers were massaging perception today, putting up a good front of confidence despite the many, many geopolitical and economic risks.

This smells like a bubble topping. That can take quite a bit of time, or not. It depends on what happens to specifically break the illusion that is driving the hot money to chase mispriced risks.

Gold and silver finished largely unchanged. The Comex is becoming a betting parlor that happens to have a little physical metal in the back room. This is more true for gold rather than silver, given the activities of some parties in Comex silver to use it as a delivery mechanism for their wholesale operations.

I still like gold and silver here, but until they can break out this is an uncertain position on the charts. The formations have not yet activated, but are there waiting to open up. The resistance by the metals bears has been determined, but paper driven.

As I mentioned the other week, the tumor in the queen's brain has come back and is so deeply positioned as to be inoperable  So tomorrow we begin radiation treatments every day for three weeks with the goal of eliminating it.  It will be a tough go, and I may be late or miss a few postings.

This week we remember the events of one of the most meaningful weeks in all human history. And in this is our freedom, not of the world that seeks to master us, but in spite of it.
You, my brothers and sisters, were called to be free.   But do not use your freedom to indulge your desires and your greed; rather serve one another, with humility and love. For the entirety of the law is fulfilled in keeping this one commandment: 'Love your neighbor as yourself.'

Gal 5:13-14
This we have not only forgotten, but mocked and trampled into the dirt. We live in an age when greed has been declared the greatest good, and the measure of the economy and the markets.  And so in the name of such false freedom, we may once again make a hell on earth.

Have a pleasant evening.



09 April 2017

Thomas Frank: America In the Age Hypocrisy, Hubris, and Greed


"The whole world wants to know about what the hell is happening with us. So let's talk about it. I live in Washington now, and the people I live among have no idea how people live here in the Midwest, not the faintest idea...

The last couple of years here in America have been a time of brisk prosperity according to official measurements, with unemployment down and the stock market up.

For Americans who work for a living however, nothing ever seems to improve. Wages do not grow, median household income is still well below where it was in 2007. Economists have a way of measuring this, they call it the 'labor share of the Gross National Product' as opposed to the share taken by stockholders. The labor share of Gross National Product' hit its lowest point since records were started in 2011, and then it stayed there right for the next couple of years.

In the fall of 2014, with the stock market hitting an all time high, a poll showed that nearly 3/4 of the American public believed that the economy was still in recession, because for them it was.

There was time when average Americans could be counted upon to know correctly whether the country was going up or down, because in those days when America prospered, the American people prospered as well. These days things are different.

Let's look at it in a statistical sense. If you look at it from the middle of the 1930's (the Depression) up until the year 1980, the lower 90 percent of the population of this country, what you might call the American people, that group took home 70 percent of the growth in the country's income. If you look at the same numbers from 1997 up until now, from the height of the great Dot Com bubble up to the present, you will find that this same group, the American people, pocketed none of this country's income growth at all.

Our share of these great good times was zero, folks. The upper ten percent of the population, by which we mean our country's financiers and managers and professionals, consumed the entire thing. To be a young person in America these days is to understand instinctively the downward slope that so many of us are on."

Thomas Frank, Kansas City Missouri, 6 April 2017


"The problem of the last three decades is not the 'vicissitudes of the marketplace,' but rather deliberate actions by the government to redistribute income from the rest of us to the one percent. This pattern of government action shows up in all areas of government policy."

Dean Baker


"When the modern corporation acquires power over markets, power in the community, power over the state and power over belief, it is a political instrument, different in degree but not in kind from the state itself. To hold otherwise — to deny the political character of the modern corporation — is not merely to avoid the reality. It is to disguise the reality. The victims of that disguise are those we instruct in error."

John Kenneth Galbraith

In 2012 I said that such unsustainable social arrangements as we have now are backed by force and fraud. And as the fraud loses its power over time, force must increase, until there is a correction of the system in genuine reform, or an eventual reset.

What shall we blame for the manner in which our economic system has gone wrong? Or will any with a public podium even admit it has gone wrong? After all, what is truth?

Is it a problem of 'fakes news sites' running contrary opinions to the established narrative?

Is it the failure of working people to rise to the occasion and elevate the 'lesser of two evils' to power so that she might further enrich herself and her supporters, whose disappointment and outrage at a missed payday knows no bounds?

Is it the impersonal forces of technology, and trade, and all of the superficially structured but high sounding economic laws that have served to promote almost every abuse of the public good that has been suffered for the past thirty years?

Or perhaps it is time for people of conscience to stop standing idly by while a powerful few are serving themselves the most of our gains, at great cost to others, and to break the silence about where we have gone wrong, and what is needed to be done to correct it.

"And some of us who have already begun to break the silence of the night have found that the calling to speak is often a vocation of agony, but we must speak.  We must speak with all the humility that is appropriate to our limited vision, but we must speak."

Martin Luther King, 4 April 1967