Financial topics

Investments, gold, currencies, surviving after a financial meltdown
Higgenbotham
Posts: 7436
Joined: Wed Sep 24, 2008 11:28 pm

Re: Financial topics

Post by Higgenbotham »

At this stage, the driving force in this market no longer has anything to do with anything rational. The driving force at this stage is FEAR.

But this is not a fear of decline. Instead, it is a fear of higher prices. The short sellers in Telsa, for example, have driven that stock up 200 points in the last two months and over 50 points just today alone! This massive advance has had nothing to do with earnings or growth. This spike was all about one thing: FEAR. Fear of higher prices, and now shorts are paying anything they have to to get out before it goes higher!

The Fear Greed Meter from CNN is calculated from these components and is day after day registering near-record numbers. Those numbers reflect the record level of GREED in the emotional buying this month, but even more, they reflect FEAR. Fear of higher prices. That Fear of higher prices is producing the highest Put/Call ratios since the January 2018 Top. It's also providing the highest Equity-Only (meaning STOCK Options) since 2014. This "fever" is creating the lowest 10-day average of TRINQ (the "TRIN" for NASDAQ) since 2007.

A FEVER of Fear of getting caught short or missing what "the crowd" believes will be sharply higher prices ahead is driving the bus now. The crowd has no fear of the downside. But they are scared to death now of higher market prices. This behavior is, of course, totally irrational. But rationality at this stage has become irrelevant.

That is just what Gustave Le Bon's book, "The Crowd," is all about, the hypnotic effect crowd-think has on otherwise rational and intelligent individuals. It produces thoughts and actions these normally sensible individuals would never even consider absent the contagion of getting caught up into the crowd emotion. But as occurs whenever this point in the cycle happens, that fear will break very soon. When it does the prices markets will do what they always do under these conditions.

When will the fever break? Soon - but we cannot know exactly which hour. We do know that at this stage, it always does. Once it breaks, my actions will not be about a "trade." It will be all about a deep sustained decline.

The sentiment is screaming, “TOP!”
While the periphery breaks down rather slowly at first, the capital cities of the hegemon should collapse suddenly and violently.

Higgenbotham
Posts: 7436
Joined: Wed Sep 24, 2008 11:28 pm

Re: Financial topics

Post by Higgenbotham »

John wrote:** 14-Jan-2020 World View: Bubble
Higgenbotham wrote: > This stock market bubble is way, way crazier than the all time
> (dollar) high in silver in 2011. There's no comparison at all in
> my opinion.

> I would say this stock market bubble is at least an order of
> magnitude crazier than the 2011 silver top. We've even got a US
> president pumping the stock market bubble using his twitter
> account. It's completely nuts. We've got the financing of
> retirements tied to the performance of the stock market and
> completely dependent on a continuing stock market bubble, which is
> the biggest bubble in the history of the world. Nuts.
It's not clear that Trump even understands that there's a stock
market bubble. But if he does, he wouldn't want it to burst
before the election.
If he doesn't understand, it's because he chooses not to understand. Because he understood at S&P 2100.
26 Sep, 2016 | 22:05

Trump: 'We are in a big, fat, ugly bubble'

Donald Trump reiterated his belief that Janet Yellen and the Federal Reserve are keeping interest rates low for political reasons during the first presidential debate on Sept. 26.

"The Fed is being more political than Secretary Clinton," the Republican presidential candidate said.
https://www.spglobal.com/marketintellig ... sg4p7wxrq2
While the periphery breaks down rather slowly at first, the capital cities of the hegemon should collapse suddenly and violently.

richard5za
Posts: 893
Joined: Sun Sep 21, 2008 10:29 am
Location: South Africa

Re: Financial topics

Post by richard5za »

Currently the FED continues to pump money into the market under the name REPO CRISIS which is just another name for Quantitative Easing or printing money, and that's feeding the bubble.

I am currently of the opinion that the market can be pumped higher before a blow off top'. Whether is will blow off pre-election is another debate

If think Trump understands that a pre-election crash will be very bad for him and that's the first priority for Trump

Higgenbotham
Posts: 7436
Joined: Wed Sep 24, 2008 11:28 pm

Re: Financial topics

Post by Higgenbotham »

Higgenbotham wrote:Another one of the better timing indicators is when the permabulls on the trading boards start slinging insults at the shorts and posting frenetically at the same time the market is making a new all time high.
A good example is here. Peter has been looking for a top. I've heard him advise people not to short. In past weeks, there are a few nice, polite comments thanking him for his analysis. But all of a sudden at last night's high (a new all time high) a frenetic torrent of irrational insults hits the comment section of his youtube channel.
RIMM
9 hours ago
this guy misses one of the best rallies ever for the last 200 S & P points cheering for an event that is means nothing ... What is really the difference between 17 and 18 days ... nothing !!!

Michael Carusone
9 hours ago
Nice contrarian sign. Amazing only a mere 12.5 months ago we were literally almost 1000, yes 1000 ! S&P points lower, and you act like it was ancient history! I’m sure you’re just a papertrader at this point.

Andrew Lyberopoulos
8 hours ago (edited)
If you are game enough to long this market whilst a good majority of stocks are in blow off moves then good luck too you.
Been there and done that in 2000 to know that this momentum is unsustainable and will ultimately end badly because when it finally does come 95% will get caught out.
Unless you are short term trader best place is on the sidelines

RIMM
7 hours ago
@Michael Carusone you don't understand what i meant ... that's alright can tell you this ... that i know peter for more than 30 years ... he is a complete disaster ... this is evidenced that at 3000 on the s & p he pronounced how an important day it was calling a top ... that is peter ... it should be obvious how wrong he has been for the past two months on a daily basis ... it is all about his "ego" ... he does not care about making you money .. i wish you the best of luck in your trading and i hope you are a successful "whale" good luck !!!

Michael Carusone
7 hours ago
RIMM
I just started watching him a few weeks ago. However, seems like you have a lot of time on your hands for some reason . Successful and productive people don’t generally care for, or have time for, petty things .

yoyo762
7 hours ago
@RIMM True. This guy calls a top EVERY episode. And he was a perennial loser while he had TV time on financial shows. They don't even bother with him anymore because he is such a joke.

RIMM
7 hours ago
@Michael Carusone very petty response ... i care about others ... peter is a disaster ... he will send you to the poor house ... trying to help those with no experience such as yourself ... you should appreciate that ... obviously you don't ... best of luck with your investing endeavors
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kzs4NTaPE78
While the periphery breaks down rather slowly at first, the capital cities of the hegemon should collapse suddenly and violently.

richard5za
Posts: 893
Joined: Sun Sep 21, 2008 10:29 am
Location: South Africa

Re: Financial topics

Post by richard5za »

Yes, but it could still be 500 points from the top!
Higgenbotham wrote:
Higgenbotham wrote:Another one of the better timing indicators is when the permabulls on the trading boards start slinging insults at the shorts and posting frenetically at the same time the market is making a new all time high.
A good example is here. Peter has been looking for a top. I've heard him advise people not to short. In past weeks, there are a few nice, polite comments thanking him for his analysis. But all of a sudden at last night's high (a new all time high) a frenetic torrent of irrational insults hits the comment section of his youtube channel.
RIMM
9 hours ago
this guy misses one of the best rallies ever for the last 200 S & P points cheering for an event that is means nothing ... What is really the difference between 17 and 18 days ... nothing !!!

Michael Carusone
9 hours ago
Nice contrarian sign. Amazing only a mere 12.5 months ago we were literally almost 1000, yes 1000 ! S&P points lower, and you act like it was ancient history! I’m sure you’re just a papertrader at this point.

Andrew Lyberopoulos
8 hours ago (edited)
If you are game enough to long this market whilst a good majority of stocks are in blow off moves then good luck too you.
Been there and done that in 2000 to know that this momentum is unsustainable and will ultimately end badly because when it finally does come 95% will get caught out.
Unless you are short term trader best place is on the sidelines

RIMM
7 hours ago
@Michael Carusone you don't understand what i meant ... that's alright can tell you this ... that i know peter for more than 30 years ... he is a complete disaster ... this is evidenced that at 3000 on the s & p he pronounced how an important day it was calling a top ... that is peter ... it should be obvious how wrong he has been for the past two months on a daily basis ... it is all about his "ego" ... he does not care about making you money .. i wish you the best of luck in your trading and i hope you are a successful "whale" good luck !!!

Michael Carusone
7 hours ago
RIMM
I just started watching him a few weeks ago. However, seems like you have a lot of time on your hands for some reason . Successful and productive people don’t generally care for, or have time for, petty things .

yoyo762
7 hours ago
@RIMM True. This guy calls a top EVERY episode. And he was a perennial loser while he had TV time on financial shows. They don't even bother with him anymore because he is such a joke.

RIMM
7 hours ago
@Michael Carusone very petty response ... i care about others ... peter is a disaster ... he will send you to the poor house ... trying to help those with no experience such as yourself ... you should appreciate that ... obviously you don't ... best of luck with your investing endeavors
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kzs4NTaPE78

John
Posts: 11478
Joined: Sat Sep 20, 2008 12:10 pm
Location: Cambridge, MA USA
Contact:

Re: Financial topics

Post by John »

** 14-Jan-2020 World View: Bubble
John wrote: > It's not clear that Trump even understands that there's a stock
> market bubble. But if he does, he wouldn't want it to burst
> before the election.
Higgenbotham wrote: > If he doesn't understand, it's because he chooses not to
> understand. Because he understood at S&P 2100.
Trump on 26 Sep, 2016 | 22:05 wrote: > Trump: 'We are in a big, fat, ugly bubble'

> Donald Trump reiterated his belief that Janet Yellen and the
> Federal Reserve are keeping interest rates low for political
> reasons during the first presidential debate on Sept. 26.

> "The Fed is being more political than Secretary Clinton," the
> Republican presidential candidate said.

> [urlhttps://www.spglobal.com/marketintelligence/en/ ... sg4p7wxrq2[/url]
OK, but I think it's more nuanced than that.

When I was talking about a bubble and crash in the mid-2000s, people
would say, "That can't happen. After the 1929 crash, laws were passed
to make sure that a new crash would never happen again."

As I pointed out at the time, those laws had all been repealed in the
1980s and 1990s.

And then there's the continuing mystery of Alan Greenspan. I followed
all his speeches in the early 2000s. All the mainstream economic
reporters were whining, "Whaaa, whaaa, whaaa, Greenspan uses big
words, and even though I'm supposed to be an expert, I'm actually too
stupid to understand what he's saying."

I didn't understand Greenspan's speeches at first either, but I would
go the Federal Reserve web site and read it over a few times, and then
I always understood. But that was beyond the mental capacity of all
the "experts" at WSJ, CNBC, and elsewhere.

So as I wrote at the time, Greenspan knew in 2004 that there was a
housing bubble, but he thought it was a good thing, because it gave
people more money. In Dec 2004, he told the WSJ that he knew in the
late 90s that a bubble was growing, but that he decided to take care
of it later. It wasn't until 2005 that he became alarmed.

Milton Friedman had "proved" that the Great Depression had occurred
because the Fed kept interest rates too high, and could have been
prevented completely by lowering interest rates a bit. He said that
any depression could be ended quickly by using a helicopter to drop
money and spread it around.

And of course Ben Bernanke said that he didn't believe in bubbles, and
always "knew" that a bubble could be safely deflated by using
Milton Friedman's helicopter idea.

The 2008 financial crisis proved that Friedman, Greenspan and Bernanke
were all completely full of crap. But then the Fed took up the battle
with quantitative easing.

So now we're in a huge bubble again, the hugest bubble in all of human
history. But anybody who talks about a stock market "crash" says it
will only fall 10-20%, because now the Fed is oh so clever, and has
"saved some bullets" to be used if there's a recession.

So when I say that Trump may not believe there's a bubble, what I mean
is that he knows about the 2000 bubble and the 2007 bubble, but he
doesn't believe that a bubble bursting will have severe consequences.
That's really no different than not believing in a bubble at all.

One other memory: In the mid-2000s, no one believed that there was a
housing bubble, even though it was completely obvious, as I wrote in
many articles. Mainstream financial analysts, economists and
journalists would say, "Housing prices can't go down -- people have to
live somewhere," and "Banks won't foreclose -- it's not in their
interest to do so" and "These housing construction firms know what
they're doing, and they wouldn't be building houses if it were just a
bubble."

It wasn't until 2010 that mainstream economist idiots even admitted
that there had been a housing bubble --- five years earlier!!!

And of course there was the whole subprime mortgage fraud, the biggest
financial fraud in the history of the world, that Obama covered up by
accepting hundreds of billions of dollars in donations to himself and
his cronies in exchange for not prosecuting.

So that's all in the past. Today we have Trump. I've said many times
that, because of his connection to Steve Bannon, and Bannon's
expertise in Generational Dynamics through working with me, Trump is
well aware that war with China is coming. The reporters in the media,
most of whom couldn't find China on a map, are totally baffled by
Trump's foreign policy, 98% of which makes perfect sense when you
realize that the issue is war with China.

But Bannon is also very aware of the coming financial crisis. In
fact, that's what the documentary movie Generation Zero was mainly
about, and that's the movie that Bannon produced and I appeared in.
So Bannon would certainly have told Trump about the danger of a stock
market bubble and global financial crisis.

But that doesn't mean that Trump believes it. Trump may well believe,
like all the mainstream idiots, that there's a bubble going on, and
even if there is a bubble, and even if the bubble bursts, then it
won't be any worse than the bubbles that burst in 2000 and 2007.
That's just as good as not believing there's a bubble.

aeden
Posts: 12353
Joined: Sat Jul 31, 2010 12:34 pm

Re: Financial topics

Post by aeden »

VIX we are observing a increase in net positioning although from a very low level but could signs that bigger players in the futures and option markets are preparing... tyler
http://gdxforum.com/forum/search.php?ke ... sf=msgonly

Nov 16, 2019 7:11 am --- TVC:VIX/CBOE:VIX3M (Derived Data) .8 - 0.0 (−3.91%) <=, > ~opts
(>1.25) means a high current volatility, but expected lower volatility 3 months out... tyler

.99019 tracking trend on bot -- hunter - seeker - inception date Mon Nov 16, 2009 7:13 pm Observation: Farming Culture -ALG's lucust's Vs. Hunter Culture - DCA seekers. The spread error "mine" since all math is wrong was a feature since the paper tiger files.

We are slowly walking out on a few positions doing well.
The phase one fair trade should buffer.
Trending a few that already are.
As we warranted correctly preserve gains
and trimmed a few funds ongoing as noted on sentiment unwinds
we concurred with.
We garnered jan15 in our view only.
Both elephants trample grass and are circling each for rhetoric
which averts the needs analysis. In some cases over ten months
in utter depravity to reality.

Current dialog improving.
http://gdxforum.com/forum/viewtopic.php ... res#p48392

Drift is more tenable given the mental slush discussion ongoing here also.

Higgenbotham
Posts: 7436
Joined: Wed Sep 24, 2008 11:28 pm

Re: Financial topics

Post by Higgenbotham »

John wrote:** 14-Jan-2020 World View: Bubble

So Bannon would certainly have told Trump about the danger of a stock
market bubble and global financial crisis.

But that doesn't mean that Trump believes it. Trump may well believe,
like all the mainstream idiots, that there's a bubble going on, and
even if there is a bubble, and even if the bubble bursts, then it
won't be any worse than the bubbles that burst in 2000 and 2007.
That's just as good as not believing there's a bubble.
I would say you're almost certainly right in that assessment.

Say, like Trump, you've been in the real estate business, and you recognize it's a bubble and has been for along time. It's logical to say, well, it's been a bubble for a long time and the way to address it has been to buy the dip and then wait for some excesses, trim holdings, wait for the next dip, etc. The practical way to be successful in navigating the bubble has been to take on debt and assume the general trajectory is onward and upward to bigger and bigger bubbles with speed bumps along the road. People who have the constitution to operate in that manner are the only ones who have amassed fortunes since the 1987 crash (Hendricks Holdings, for example) and among that class of people a certain groupthink has developed and a level of genius is inappropriately attributed to that kind of thinking (another more widely known example, the cult of Warren Buffet which would never have existed absent the bubble environment since 1987).
While the periphery breaks down rather slowly at first, the capital cities of the hegemon should collapse suddenly and violently.


John
Posts: 11478
Joined: Sat Sep 20, 2008 12:10 pm
Location: Cambridge, MA USA
Contact:

Re: Financial topics

Post by John »

** 16-Jan-2020 World View: Financial speed bumps
Higgenbotham wrote: > Say, like Trump, you've been in the real estate business, and you
> recognize it's a bubble and has been for along time. It's logical
> to say, well, it's been a bubble for a long time and the way to
> address it has been to buy the dip and then wait for some
> excesses, trim holdings, wait for the next dip, etc. The practical
> way to be successful in navigating the bubble has been to take on
> debt and assume the general trajectory is onward and upward to
> bigger and bigger bubbles with speed bumps along the road. People
> who have the constitution to operate in that manner are the only
> ones who have amassed fortunes since the 1987 crash (Hendricks
> Holdings, for example) and among that class of people a certain
> groupthink has developed and a level of genius is inappropriately
> attributed to that kind of thinking (another more widely known
> example, the cult of Warren Buffet which would never have existed
> absent the bubble environment since 1987).
I left the false panic of 1987 out of my summary in my last message.

To use your phrase, there have been three "speed bumps" since 1929:
  • The false panic of 1987 = 1929+58. This is related to the
    58-Year Hypothesis in generational theory, which says that 58 years
    after a massive public catastrophe, the last cohort of people with
    personal memory of the catastrophe retires, resulting in a (false)
    panic.
  • The Nasdaq crash of 2000, the last year of Clinton administration.
    This was the collapse of the "tech bubble" brought about by the
    Silents/Boomers who saw that the 1987 panic really wasn't so bad after
    all. In the 1980s, companies like Lotus, Ashton-Tate, IBM, Compaq and
    Microsoft made a lot of money, and the Silents/Boomers wanted to do
    the same with their own companies and made reckless investments. By
    the way, the 1990s bubble was not "caused" by the internet. It was
    "caused" by the false panic of 1987 combined with the PC explosion of
    the 1980s, combined with the retirement of the last people with
    remaining memory of the Great Depression. This is actually another
    illustration of the 58-Year Hypothesis.
  • The subprime crash of 2008, and the collapse of the real estate
    bubble. The "cause" of the real estate bubble was the rise of
    Generation-X, who were furious that they were personally swindled by
    the Silents/Boomers in the Nasdaq crash. This tied into their fury at
    their fathers over the high divorce rate. They decided to get revenge
    by creating tens of trillions of dollars in fraudulent subprime
    mortgage backed synthetic securities, and then selling then to their
    fathers' generation to screw them and swindle them. Unfortunately,
    they created millions of bankrupt and homeless families in all
    generations.
Each of those three "speed bumps" was worse than the previous one, but
still not severe enough to require fundamental changes -- in
particular, reduction in public debt, with government debt alone now
well above $20 trillion.

It's been a very, very long time since the last "speed bump," and
investors are assuming that speed bump #4 won't be as bad as #3
because new laws have been passed, and because the Fed has become so
much more clever. It's a major delusional fantasy, We still don't
know when speed bump #4 will occur, but we can be absolutely certain
that it will be much worse than #3.

Post Reply

Who is online

Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 29 guests