sigh....

Courtesy of work.failblog.org.

You don't even have to fucking explain it. We all could predict this. Steal $100, you get 15 years. Steal $3 billion, you get 40 months. It's not even because one guy's black and the other's white, or one guy's poor and the other's rich.

And you wonder why I keep going off on hyperbolic anarchist tangents about bankers, their own intestines, and strangling one with the other.

COPX - one week later

Well, there's COPX, the copper miners ETF, one week later. Would have been a really good trade, eh? Though I guess it's about to pull back to its short-term EMA, it doesn't seem to like getting too far ahead of things.

I guess when you look at COPX, you have to wonder why $HUI hasn't behaved the same way. In fact, is this really the time to be in precious metals miners? Or should we instead be looking at copper and the base metals?

Of course, if China goes in the dumpster, I guess the last thing you're going to want is a BM miner.

Oh well. One good ETF pick for me. No, I never bought it. So I missed a 10% gain. So what.

This is what it's like to be an addict

I'm jonesin' for some quotes, man! Don't hold out on me man!

Pretty sad when I have to go figure out how to use the BVL website to look up quotes.

This afternoon:

Rio Alto up 1.4%.
Bear Creek untraded?
Fortuna unchanged/untraded? wtf?

I dunno. Maybe I'm using it wrong.

As GT notes, the gold miners are going back down today, it's not the end of the world. 500's still got a little green line waiting to catch it if it falls too far. This is a long weekend anyway, nobody's trading, nothing to see here move on.

Friday Videos - revolutionary unrest edition

As I said, it's the 70s all over again. Stagflation and unrest.

So let's see if the 70s had anything legitimate to say about that....



You can't start off without Hawkwind. Hard to find anything from this period other than video mashups... I think this was from the huge Hawkwind documentary from the UK, which you can also watch on Youtube.

BTW, while we're on the subject of Hawkwind... Michael Moorcock was (is? so many good authors have died recently - nope, just checked Wikipedia, he's still alive) a terrific fun author who also worked for a long time with Hawkwind. Not just in sci-fi and fantasy though - if you want some good fun, find a short novel of his called "The Chinese Agent", a spy novel with a twist.

Next is Black Sabbath.



No more war pigs have the power! Hand of god has struck the hour! Begging mercy for their sins? Satan laughing spreads his wings! Not Milton, but it's close, really.

Anyway...

Way ahead of/behind its time, in 1988, was the John Carpenter movie They Live. Real classic. I hope they remake it. The original starred Canadian wrestler Rowdy Roddy Piper, but for the remake I'd personally go for Stone Cold Steve Austin (you've gotta keep it consistent). I'd accept The Rock in a pinch.

Here's a short scene from the movie which kinda lets you in on the secret. You'll want to see the whole thing.



Back to music....



I dunno... Dead Kennedys were onto this whole thing back in the early 80s, during the last big Recession. But did anyone do anything about it? No. Cos punks do too much drugs and booze.



If you want to find someone from something more approaching this century who's on the same wavelength, listen to Atari Teenage Riot. I mean, pretty much 8 out of 10 EBM bands are on that wavelength too, but I have to ease in Otto's crowd slowly, right?

BTW... if you don't get the source of my self-righteous anger, you haven't yet watched Inside Job. So do it. Here's the trailer.

This morning

I'm not going to worry about the markets much today, because I'm in Canada and have no way to trade out of any TSX position. Doesn't matter much anyway - I feel very good about most of the stocks I own. RIO, SWD and BCM are all down about as low as they should go, if they went lower I'd probably buy more, and as for the rest, they're penny stocks that aren't going anywhere til some bit of news pops them something like 40% - or not. Doesn't matter, I don't own very much of any of them (except AUU, which you should all buy not just because I'm a shameless "believer" but also because no really they're going to strike the motherlode I know it cos my Tarot cards said so).

Gold and silver are down strongly this morning. Turd Ferguson suggests that it's the result of the grains report killing the entire CRB. UUP (US dollar ETF) started slightly up - not negating yesterday yet - and IEF (10 year bond ETF) is slightly down. So it is indeed just a boring old commodity selloff.

Boring. Remember the oil selloff? Last week or something? Oil's back to $94 now. Does that indicate something to you?

I guess we should expect selling anyway? It's the long weekend for both Canada and the US, so people will go to cash to avoid getting caught with their pants down?

When PMs are down, always remember Otto's "nothing to see here" gold chart. Also always remember that, almost every single year, gold puts in at least one correction of at least 10 percent. And whatever happens to the GSR ratio, before you put too much stock into this weekend's Charts Of Doom, remember that it's nothing more than the price of gold divided by the price of silver. GSR is meaningful when it is.

Watch this guy's podcast. The bond bandits are attacking Italy and Spain now. I look forward to the resurgence of the Red Brigade and Baader Mienhof. If this age's paradigm is a repeat of the 70s with stagflation and political chaos, you can bet we'll be seeing a resurgence of anarchist revolutionarianism. I find that sexxay.

Anyway. Y'all get Friday videos, later today. Maybe more than usual, so I can freak out the newbies. There ain't no Queen and Coldplay on my playlist.

S&P 500 DOWN 530, NASDAQ DOWN 120

The title of this blog post is what you're going to have to read in your news feeds tomorrow afternoon. Because if you don't read something that bad, the doomsayers who have been nattering away about "8 consecutive down weeks buy gold buy MREs* buy ammo" will have nothing to post about.

Alternately, you'll need to see that much of a drop over the whole of next week for us to get a negating weekly candle.

How likely is that, y'think? I'd be totally open to another boring slow drift down after all of Wall Street's drugs wear off next week. But catastrophe?

---

* - MRE = "meal ready to eat". Apparently very yummy, high-carb high-fat prepackaged army food.

Here's a video of someone talking about MREs, if you'd like to know more. Don't worry - it's probably not a ZeroHedger or a survivalist. With his earnest smile, clean shave and youthful looks, I'd have to think he must be a real member of the military somewhere. So no, he doesn't have any silver rounds or shitty OTC exploreco stocks for you to buy.



Survivalists don't buy real MREs. They buy fake crap off the internet.

crisis? what crisis?

Hey! Remember when we were all gonna die?

And I was the lone voice screaming from a darkened room that $VIX was in mild disagreement?

Because $VIX had gone up to, like, 23 or something?

This doesn't prove I'm a genius. It proves there are simple ways that any fool can use to verify or disprove any prediction.

Set your PDF viewer to autoignore all sentences using words like "fiat", "Zimbabwe", "Paul", "gold", "Federal Reserve", "silver", "ZeroHedge", "Obama", "death panels", "Geithner", "Bernanke", "Shibor", and all that other crap political dogma that internet blatherers use to interpret the world around them. Ask them to prove things using simple metrics.

If the $VIX don't fit, you must ignore that shit!

another clarification, and a note

BTW re previous post: I'm not trying to predict or anything. If you're coming here for predictions, understand that I've only been in the stock market for 18 months. Before that I was some dupe who bought bank mutual funds. Trusting me to predict things is silly... despite the fact I've managed to get things right before. Fact is, I've also got things wrong before.

Also, reminder to all newsletter subscribers everywhere. If your fave NL comes out on the weekend, you only have a few more hours to buy those stocks that he's going to be saying nice things about this weekend, and sell the stocks he's going to be saying bad things about. TSX is closed tomorrow.

Seriously... I made so much money buying something cruddy on a Friday afternoon, then selling it to certain readers on Monday morning. Some writers are so easy to front-run, even when they don't let you in on their upcoming content. :-)

Biiwii on $SPX - one day later

GT posted yesterday:

S&P 500 pings an important parameter

Well, it passed through the EMA(50) today. But I don't really get the significance: the S&P passed right through the EMA(50) a few times recently without really caring.

Here's a close-up of the $SPX showing the EMA(50):



Didn't really do much, unlike the SMA(200) that everyone's been on about with the two really good pings and all. The EMA(50) hasn't really been all that magical these past few months.

On the other hand, here's the S&P with its EMA(12) and EMA(80):



EMA(12) seems to be support in short-term upmoves and resistance in short-term downmoves. Meanwhile the EMA(80) has looked beautiful in this chart - not including the Fukushima panic in March, sure, but even there the EMA(80) was only violated for 2 days, during the absolute worst of the panic, so feel free to break out your eraser and wipe off those 2 days (like lots of tech analysts do, apparently).

Anyway, whatever. This is niggling over details. My point was that if you ever use technical indicators that have a bracket, it's good to investigate what the bracket means, and why anyone would intend to use such an indicator in the first place. In the case of moving averages, they're only significant if they're significant. Put one in a chart and see if it's significant; if it's not been significant these past few months, then maybe the character of the market is different now and we should find whatever moving average has proven some recent significance.

In any case, S&P broke through the EMA(50) and (80) today. Wonder how this will get spun this weekend? Is this bullish all of a sudden? But shouldn't the market be going down now that we know there's no QE3 and the US has gone into fiscal tightening mode? Why aren't we falling off a cliff then? Don't the goldbugs say we should be falling off a cliff? How will Ron Paul save us if the market proves it doesn't need him after all? But early July is always a summer rally, isn't it?

Yeah, then what about $COPPER and COPX?

Obama Finally Grows A Pair

I couldn't find local coverage of this story that didn't have the fucking stupid opinions of idiot American pundits smeared all over it like poop on padded-room walls. So we'll have to get our news from the Bangkok Post.

Obama raps Republicans

Personally I think Obama's been an utter sissy. He had the chance to reform the USA back before Ted Kennedy died. He had total control of the House and Senate. What did he do? Nothing. He sat around with a stupid smile on his face while the untter fruitcakes of the radical Nazi wing of the Republicans spent months accusing him of being a socialist Muslim sleeper agent in charge of death panels.

But we can learn from his utter failure:

• strike when the iron is hot. (trad.)


• the first rule of warfare is, hit them with a fist. (some general somwhere)


• [it is good to] crush your enemies, see them scatter before you, and hear the lamentations of their women. (Conan T. Barbarian)

Maybe someday the US will get a leader with a pair of balls who's got what it takes to take on the ultra-rich, the fundie nutcases and the corrupt classes. Until then, they're going to remain a kleptocracy.

Let's micromanage $HUI even more

OK, let's micromanage $HUI some more.

That yellow lightly shaded area was previous support, now it's resistance. $HUI's dropped from there this morning.

The red moving average line is the EMA(10), which has (til last week) been supportive of advances and resistance for declines. We're above it right now.

The blue moving average is the SMA(30). During the past 2 months, it's been more or less resistance for reversals during the decline. We bounced off it in beginning of June, and again last week, and again today. I guess we need to see $HUI punch through that before we can be really hopeful? While if the EMA(10) doesn't hold, like last week, we should become cynical again?

The nice thing is, there's that green short-term support line I've drawn. A drop below that is possibly real bad, but it's pretty close so it's not like we can suffer a big draw-down waiting for a retest.

I dunno. The market is dumb today. Silver and gold are down, but this is despite UUP and IEF also being down - strongly down, actually. and the S&P 500 and NASDAQ are also strongly up, yet again.

It's up to you whether this commentary is of any value. I'm not suggesting I'm a great technical analyst. At the same time, I'm not suggesting that any technical analyst can tell you what's going to happen.

However, I'd suggest you go take a look at COPX, the copper miners ETF. Up another 2% today. By Otto's chart from last week, maybe now's a very good time to get into the copper miners? Do you want to hold an old fave like Lumina or CUU, or maybe a beaten-down crap-pile like Coro? Or just the ETF? Up to you. Looks good to me, but I haven't bought COPX yet.

Maybe that's a contrary indicator. I seem to never buy the good ones when they start to take off.

last post of the night I promise

I've got some boring educational crap to read. Or failing that, the last of the booze to drink.

But I just noticed a copper price of $4.20, and it's apparently even today's price.

Well, the doldrums are over then, we can quit listening to GT and the doomsayers and go back to raking in the cash like it grows on trees.

micromanaging $HUI - one day later

How's $HUI again? I haven't posted about it for a whole day.


So there's that red line again, and it even intersects with a horizontal yellow shaded thing that GT would probably call "a horizontal line of resistance". So I guess if $HUI gives another good day tomorrow and plows through the yellow shaded thing and the red line, what with the second Greek vote and the US debt talks and all, then it must mean the world's not ending and we can all pile into the market and buy all the stocks that I've been wanting to sell to you for weeks now?

Or does that only work til we meet that scary SMA(200) and SMA(50), and the Yanks come back from their long weekend and dump stocks again?

I'm actually pretty happy looking at that $HUI chart. I didn't even really lose any money in miners in May... I lost it all in February and March. Yup, I looked it up and since May 2 I have a paper gain of about 3%, and I never go to cash and am terrible at shorting.

CLARIFICATION

OK, I need to clarify some things for the drunken horde that's now expected to be trampling in here for a Tikka Masala after a hard day partying at Otto's.

"run by some scallywag with more money than sense"

I don't have much money. So I guess, by implication, I have less sense? Seriously, if you own a house (and it's not in the USA), chances are you have more money than me. But sense?

I did, however, make a strong profit last year (my rookie year trading stocks), and mainly on GNH and CMM. Considering how crappy (check the charts) both of those companies were (Otto doesn't even mock GNH because it's so below his radar), I think that gives me bragging rights. And I even lost money on Silvercrest, believe it or not. After doing a NAV calc even.

It all might have been beginner's luck though.

So don't assume for a second that I have any clue what I'm talking about whenever I post anything at all here.

And this blog really is just for me to post my own thoughts, to myself, because I remember things better when I write them down, and because I like wasting my employer's time and pennyflipping stocks wasn't causing enough damage anymore.

"that's recently fallen in love with junior mining trading"

Pennyflipping, actually. I do honestly try doing the wise and patient buy-and-hold thing, and I get bloody annoyed doing it. I like buying cheap stocks, then selling them for less cheap. I don't like holding them like dead money, or watching them get cheaper. I get bored sitting on a 10% gain (like RIO) waiting for it to hit 100%. Screw it! I can grab a handful of GPM this morning and dump it by the afternoon for a 10% gain? Done!

"and actually thinks your humble scribe knows what he's talking about."

Yeah, well. Otto does due diligence. I... sorta... don't. In that sense, I rely on him.

Actually, I do often get inspired to do intensive research on companies right about the time that I've lost over 10% on them. Before a drawdown, what's the point?

"If the chart is good, buy the chart! If the chart stinks, avoid the chart! And in case you forgot, a good chart goes up and a bad chart goes down." - Victor Sperandeo.

"If a supposedly good company puts out supposedly good news and the stock goes down? Don't research it, dump it." - Jesse Livermore, probably.

"Who needs MACD and RSI and candle patterns and cup-n-handle and head-n-shoulders? Draw a red line. Does it go up? Well there you go." - Victor Sperandeo again.

BTW. I prefer NAV calculations, while I guess Otto prefers valuations based on cash flow multiple. Not that I ever provide anyone with anything useful like a NAV calc for a company! And if I ever did? You can bet I'm talking my book and I'm trying to dump the stock into your lap. Because I'm just some bozo like you, and humans are just silly greedy animals. And if I can screw you out of $10K to put towards my Beautiful Young Ukrainian Bride fund, I'll do it.

I really only follow Otto because he's got a hilariously nasty sense of humour. I subscribe to his newsletter too, but that happened originally because I made a fortune on Century and wanted to rub it in. If it wasn't for Peggy, I'd never even have found his blog. :-) So, someday I will meet him and buy him beer. Maybe at PDAC. If he doesn't ever come up to a PDAC, maybe I'll go and impersonate him. Wear a nametag with his name on it and go meet Marin Katusa or James West. Cos I've got a hilariously nasty sense of humour too.

funny little dig by Candente

Here's a NR by DNT on their Canariaco project. Basic boring update crud except for the following little dig at the doomsayers:

"Management is confident that fundamentals remain strong for worldwide copper demand and that Peru, which has tripled copper production in the past two decades, will continue to recognize the importance of mining to their economy."

Ottotrans: "Management is confident that a billion Chinese and Indians don't want to continue pooping in a hole and living in the dark, and that Peru's new president isn't a complete and utter moron who would want to exterminate 60% of the nation's economy."

200th post - here's how good the drugs are

Bear Creek Mining, who no longer even have a mine because all their property has been expropriated by an evil communist overlord*, have gone up 4%. EPU, the ETF for the country where the evil communist overlord resides, is even up 1%.

S&P printing a higher high relative to last week. Same for the NASDAQ.

IEF and UUP are also down 0.55%, so I guess that means people now prefer stocks over bonds and cash.

Ritholz warns this is all going on with very little volume. I reply that the market's responding positively to news, so that's good, isn't it?

* - actually it was Garcia who shot down Santa Ana, wasn't it?

Everyone just took a big bong hit

All of a sudden the markets are fantastic and lurvely and bunnies and flowers and big baggies of Vancouver's best wheelchair weed. The Greeks did some sort of vote, it came out nice, so now we see silver up, $HUI up to 521, COPX up 3.3%, and everyone thinking the market isn't going to collapse into a blazing pit of everlasting hellfire.

By the way, I've been thinking about the possibility that, for a junior miner person like me, COPX is a somewhat better indicator than the $HUI or the GDXJ. Copper's not sexy, but it does still have importance to the global economy; copper mines also aren't tiny little dumps, they're big and serious Lunar Landscaping operations.

PM miners can rise and fall for no good reason (for example, the month being January, or PDAC juat having happened); so if you really want to look at the market's perception of the economic fundamentals of mining, COPX is probably a better gauge to use.

I guess the test would be if there were a good correlation between COPX and Tanashian's mining fundamentals indicator (what is it? $GOLD:$CCM?). Or if COPX was a better predictor than that indicator.

Oh well. File away for discussion later.

stockhouse gold

People sometimes post pure gold on the bulletin boards.

"No real demand for copper? ya because 1 billion chinese and indian people want to continue crapping in a small hole in the floor while they live in the dark."

$HUI

Well, I got excited last week, and it ultimately ended in fail. That red line has pretty much bonked $HUI back down a couple times now.

I guess I should take heart that now we also have a green line? Is it good that it bounced back up at the head and shoulders neckline? Does this chart mean choppy-chop for a couple more weeks? Don't ask me dude, I don't know anything about any of this. I guess we have to watch HUI 515-520.

and by the way....

Oh yeah. Also, US Silver is behaving strongly again today. So the rogue Peruvian blogger can consider himself un-mocked. Or, at least, he can if it can struggle above .58. :-)

market comment

Dunno about $HUI. It looks kinda boring right now, and the morning is when it should be strong, right? At least silver's not going down anymore. And the S&P and Q are printing local higher highs.

I dumped North Country Gold. Drill results came out and they were quite frickin' embarassing, frankly. 1m of a few grams per tonne? Hard to spin that as good. That's GNH-level bad. So I accepted my being in error, took my loss and moved on. Still showing a profit on the week, as yesterday I unloaded some overage in RIO and AUU, dumped some VEM into the bid for a small 1-day profit (if the market hands me a 2% profit for 1 day's work I'm not going to refuse) and took a tiny loss on GOZ (sold at .73, as it turns out that was nowhere near the bottom).

Threw some of that money into this little Puno thing. We'll see. I find it interesting that the CEO is suggesting he can sue under the Canada-Peru FTA, or under property law.

Y'know, I do think there is a very good point in all this Gringo coverage that Otto hates: if a government is allowed to revoke a mining concession carte blanche, then that really does damage the perceived market value of all mining companies in the country, in the eyes of foreign investors. Humala doesn't have to play Chavez to destroy FDI, all he has to do is suggest to the people who didn't like him in the first place - with actions precisely like these - that their estimation of him as a "dangerous communist bent on nationalizing" is true. After all, do you really want to estimate a company's value based on the NAV of a property in Peru if property rights aren't absolute anymore?

And who owns stocks, anyway? People who don't like Humala.

So is it absolutely 100% certain it'll never be a mine? It's impossible for BCM to make enough positive noises to turn it around? How's about bribing everyone within 50 miles of the mine with $1000? Hey, in engineering, we don't believe in failure: throw enough money at any problem and it disappears.

Anyway, I should be sitting here watching the market and NOT buying til the early afternoon or so.

ABC Radio National

One of the places I like to go to look for podcasts is ABC Radio National, the Australian broadcaster. Sometimes they have some good things to listen to.

Here's an interesting one that's come up recently, I think I'll listen in tonight on my huge-data-plan Atrix with some Guinness, tilsit and cashews:

---

The evil of the daleks

They are among the most loved, or most feared, villains in science fiction. But what is it that makes Daleks such great baddies? What constitutes evil and why do the Daleks represent a very specific idea about rationality and morality? This week, we talk to a philosopher about what the Daleks have to tell us - in their mechanical, screechy voices - about who we are.

MOCKING: A DEMONSTRATION

Just a quick note that when I ever do mock, it shall be blindingly obvious. Wagnerian.

BTW, not meaning to be nasty. Just wanted to take out some frustration.

"Hey, so what hapened to SHIBOR?" ...deathly silence...

Since those frauds, freaks, tinfoil-hatecrime fruitcakes, fat urban pretend survivalists and Goldman-Sachs sleeper agents provocateurs over at ZeroHedge haven't said anything about it, I'll let you know about what happened to the Shanghai interbank rate, which was (as recently as last Friday) a portent of doom.





I'm no expert, but to me that looks like "doom averted".

As my dad used to say, especially when drunk: "It never pays to listen to fruits". Yup, truly my dad was wise. Especially when drunk.

Oil

One of the blogs I follow regularly is Trader's Narrative.

Here's an interesting little thing on oil sentiment for you, backing up what I said earlier today:

Sentix Sentiment: Crude Oil Pessimism At Extreme

market comment

Someone, either Bespoke or Ritholtz, pointed out recently that Independence Day week has historically been very strong for stocks.

Also, people are expecting the US home sales info coming out this week to be better than the previously-expected dismal. So maybe the idea is that the US domestic economy data is going to lift the markets this week.

Manufacturing data came in good.

Also, some frickin' clever guy just boosted the US economy by dumping up to 19 hours US consumption's worth of oil into the market, killing the commodity speculators. Oil down, US economy up, right? The bigger contango that's now shown up in oil (because of this) is supposed to wipe out the oil price drop, but maybe the speculators won't care now that oil's price has more than one direction again. Like with silver.

Let's see what silver and gold do after Chicago close. Today being options expiry, the price is being gamed. When the gaming ends, hopefully the precious metals go back up.

The $HUI was drawing a nice hammer candle. That might mean we've finally hit a low. At least for this week?

Then again, nothing that happens on Monday morning is informative.

Oh, I get it.

The gold smackdown on Friday was because of OpEx.

No wonder, I get it now.

I've turned too much into Otto - I see gold drop $20 and I just go "pft, long term chart still looks good."

Trotsky

I was jokingly calling someone a Trotskyite this morning when I remembered this great Monty Python episode....



What's even funnier is, it's even been subtitled into Spanish.

By the way, no, Cleese isn't speaking in Russian. But he does string together Russian surnames very convincingly.

Macusani Yellowcake

Macusani Yellowcake reversed its death spiral with a huge-volume up day. I don't know what the heck happened there, but that's about 7% of outstanding shares. Did Southern Andes buy more? Mega Uranium? Khan Resources? Or just the followers of some crappy overpriced newsletter?

I'm personally not owning and not buying. Uranium screwed me enough this year.