Financial topics

[aedens]

Blowback in motion:
http://www.coyoteblog.com/coyote_blog/2 ... mes_b.html
And the left denies facts?
http://reason.com/archives/2011/10/25/e ... stone-cape
However, eminent domain may just provide enough common ground for the environmentalist and non-environmentalist alike.
http://www.californiaeminentdomainrepor ... /projects/

[Higgenbotham]

Somebody linked to an article about how the hedge funds are buying up the junk stocks that have the most short interest. This has been seen near the end of the blowoffs from lower highs the past 5 years - May 2008 and April 2010. I've noticed it in the SOX - not to say it hasn't been more noticeable elsewhere. On this chart, the blowoff can be noted during those time periods. May 2008 was also 3 days of blowoff, same as seen this week. Not to say this won't get more extreme but it's interesting to note that with this activity as well as the VIX down 8% to a multi month low today, the S&P advanced less than a point. Of course, my guess was a minimum of 10 days early. And it may well go higher next week.

http://www.marketwatch.com/investing/in ... style=1013

[aedens]

I think we are on the same frequency of observation again.
It conveys who pulls the trigger first on the way out I assume we can agree on.
Mon Dec 05, 2011 2:10 am : Observations: Farming Culture -ALG's lucust's Vs. Hunter Culture - DCA seekers
My last trade was early this month. Was I to early, yea always seems that way.
I should dig up the context of thought captured in the forums but you
summed it up as trap door event some time ago. My thought was the technical paper
on the timeline to that event as when the tip of the funnels who get priority and
that was the crux of the beast verbiage. I will leave as outrunning the last bear
but the alg's and quants feed in there own construct. We can to a drilldown to
observation but I will leave it alone. Old summed it up rather nicely some pages back.
"Obviously they were authorized, obviously the same guarantee applies,
so how is this not an enforceable contract?"
SWF comes to mind. I am still under the impression overall the cost
of capital will go up. We are steady to date and producing to fulfill
our contracts. Noise does not change reality so volume is still low
so what does that scale to risk in the over all market?
I do not wish to pick up that paint brush. I am trying to relax
and finish some tasks. Old bulls and bears have that option to walk
to the herd.

here is a abtract view: 1 Year Performance (Intermediate-Term Bond category median performance): 6.67% (6.18%)
I did not do as well last year and given my risk threshold I did 5.24%
Given here we are fiercly independant to the core I can live with it.
I hold no pretense to being as sharp as what is truly out there.

[OLD1953]

There are always people opposed to everything, that's the nature of life I suppose. Unhappily, given that 1/3 of the population has an IQ rating below (approximately) 90, we have the resulting issue that many public decisions are made in an irrational or emotional manner. Add to that the restricted news value of public media content, and it is no wonder we have everything going at once, from ELF to the Montana Militia, all of which have "foot soldiers" from that lower 1/3, but are controlled by a few very cynical intelligent people with no morals or ethics who are at the apex of the organization. Such organizations almost always are built on the basis of special information that is known only to a few, only vast usually implausible conspiracies keep the world from knowing the "truth". That truth is generally whatever truth will cause the most excitement in the troops, and put the most money in the pockets of the few at the apex. Somehow, there is seldom an outcry from the followers when there are revelations about the wealth and lifestyle of those leaders. The wealth of Ralph Nader is NOT ALLOWED to become an issue.

Virtually every organization is built in this manner and for this same reason, it's much easier to build in this manner than any other. The few that aren't tend to be scientific or technological organizations, and guess which side of the bell curve those people came from?

And that is the short version of why the libertarian ideal cannot be realized in the real world, because too many people are just not smart enough to make any decision past what shirt to wear. There will never be a hardy group of individualists making rational decisions to guide themselves through the world, simply because there is a very large group that WILL follow the closest rationalization with a loud voice. Overall, stupidity is rampant, and we have to deal with that. Was it really an intelligent decision to allow Cotton Mather to lead thousands of people around by the nose?

You think the pipeline is causing a fuss, wait till this information percolates through the mass consciousness.

http://www.txchnologist.com/2011/the-th ... clear-cars

That'll cause some upset in the environmental groups for sure.

And for fun, try picking any three headlines from the news at random, and build a conspiracy that ties them together. It gets pretty easy after you do it a few times, rationalization is a great thing, as long as you don't believe it. A bit of practice at that, and you can have your own cult.

[Higgenbotham]

There is a pattern by which the algos can move to generate a flash upcrash. It can be seen and constructed very clearly but at the same time it is very well hidden. One of my charts showed a frequency I alluded to. The interesting thing is I believe the intervention has shortened the natural frequency and left the market open to either an upcrash or a downcrash 6-7 days from the intersection of the vibrations. If this happens, I will explain it after the fact with a diagram. The strange thing about it, is if it is a downcrash it will be very severe and the only thing I can think of to save the system from a downcrash is to have an upcrash, which will be less severe but makes the eventual crash more severe.

I would take this all to be rambling until something happens. But just suffice it to say that, aedens, I believe you are correct when you say these markets are dangerous and only those who know exactly what they're doing should be messing with them. And I'm not neccessarily presuming to be up to it because it gets more tricky with every turn.

[aedens]

There must be men who are willing to stick to principles and to fight for their full realization, however remote.
The practical compromises they must leave to the politicians as Hayek conveyed.
The three links confirmed above the treadmill effect as things move forward
as you indentified. To many with six inches brushes as conveyed.

"information percolates through the mass consciousness"

Good question on that phenomena. The only thing I remember on the trials was the follow up much later
in relationship later to specific mold on grain which induced symptoms.
Ergot of Rye is a plant disease that is caused by the fungus Claviceps purpurea.
A timeline of the effects that occurred in Salem, Massachusetts
some postulate. Some convey symptoms would have been recognizable during the time of the
Salem witch trials if they knew what it was. Whatever happened Cotton influenced
Benjamin Franklin also it is recorded.
Anyway, I find the thought family, church, township, state, federal to the speech a chicken in every pot leads to the
cult of personality's or both sides of the Pond.
Tip O'Neill and Patrick Monohan conveyed as they elaborated the file on there desk to a coal miners widow with children and how
we have the mechanism's today to the Social Security Leviathon which indeed the failures from the bottum up
and top down we all witness today. I am fortunate to have older members who lived these realities and the
mosaic of opinions to those realities. I just impress how the consequences to my young adults the lessons
from step one "home" and the linkages to rest we navigate today and the reality secular eduction can and cannot provide.
As in the beginning as conveyed the treadmill effect from the circular patterns of ideologues bent of mind on what I absolutely
observe as do you to clarity.

[Trevor]

All of this makes me glad I don't have any money in the stock market. However, my father has his pension in the stock market which has already lost thousands of dollars and will probably lose a lot more before this is over.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average seems to be holding roughly steady, despite my expectations that it would fall.

We seem to be in a bit of a problem. If we let all these businesses and banks fail, it'll cause us major problems, not to mention the rest of the world. However, since they were bailed out, they are still continuing the fraud that got them into that mess. How stupid can you get? I don't think there's either the money or the willpower to bail them out a second time.

[OLD1953]

Archaeologists have little doubt of the existence of persons practicing witchcraft in Salem. Official condemnation of such practices ensures practicioners, after all, if it wasn't effective then why would it be condemned in such harsh terms?

http://www.archaeology.org/online/featu ... ottle.html

As a writer in Brazil said about a black magic practicioner he met, "I don't believe in magic, but I DID NOT want this man sticking pins in a doll of me, with that gleefully maniac expression on his face". I quite agree with the sentiment.

Mather was an intelligent and educated man, who rationalized a great many things rather than simply saying he didn't understand them or stating that they simply didn't exist. These are exactly the sort of people who gather followers and create misery for those not in the ingroup. Why bother to test or analyze anything if you simply KNOW the answers?

I've always doubted the ergot explanation for the fits those girls had, while ergot can cause such things it should have been a good deal more widespread in the community as ergot infections commonly occur in the field, not after the grain is dried. I rather suspect the girls simply liked the attention and were all sociopaths who didn't care about the people who were hanged. (Well, one was pressed, but whatever.) The symptoms are far more congruent with PTSD or hysteria.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medical_ex ... ewitchment

Should there actually be a life after death, then Aristotle has a lot to answer for, as his philosophy made such "knowings" respectable. Even Einstein practiced what he liked to call thought experiments, and just what can you actually learn from that? There are obvious flaws in any such imagining, for instance, his gravity vs acceleration thought experiment is only applicable if you examine a mathematical point, due to the fact that gravity from any source must have closed surfaces on any equipotential, IOW, gravitational field equipotentials always form a curved gaussian surface. In any attempt to understand the universe, the human mind must be regarded as a flawed and very suspect instrument, requiring constant correction from reproducible physical data.

Going by the BDI, we have a crash due before the end of the year. Gold is in a fairly steady downward trend, Silver is much the same, the 200 day trend line has to be depressing for anyone in the metals trade. Those started dropping in April, but copper has a steady down line that started earlier. The trend line for tin is pretty rough. Everything shows a brief upwards motion for the last little while, but those are hardly enough to start a trend. If they persisted through May or June then there would be an upward trend, but right now it's just a bump. Even the futures are showing flat or nearly flat or even negative in some cases.

Unless there is another major round of stimulus, which is very unlikely IMHO, then we are not going to see consumption of metals undergo much change upwards, given that China isn't going to order that much more just to stockpile the goods. The market propping has gone on as long as it is practical for it to continue, the big players are exiting and the prices are going to bomb. While it is true that China could blow their foreign reserves to stockpile 1000 tons or so of gold, I'm putting that one in the wishful thinking pile. There's no real advantage to them to do that and no incentive, plus there isn't that much gold on the market in any event.

http://www.benzinga.com/news/12/01/2238 ... ing-volume

Re the last sentence on that page, right now I'm doing no business at all, does that mean I have infinite worth? Just a thought. Maybe I should incorporate and issue stock while guaranteeing I'll never take any action to increase the worth of said stock. Should trade well, given that bad news means higher stock prices nowadays. Can there be worse news than "I'LL NEVER CREATE VALUE"? On second thought, that's better news than Kodak gave their investors, so forget it, the Wall Streeters are ahead of me again. LOL.

[Trevor]

you cannot escape the consequences of reality forever, even if politicians believe that they can do so. We still have a stock market bubble, the housing bubble is continuing to deflate, and according to what I saw, the unemployment rate for January 2012 will likely keep it at 8.5 percent, since more and more people are giving up looking for work.

The crash has been due since 2008; we can't escape it much longer.

[aedens]

you cannot escape the consequences of reality forever, even if politicians believe that they can do so. We still have a stock market bubble, the housing bubble is continuing to deflate, and according to what I saw, the unemployment rate for January 2012 will likely keep it at 8.5 percent, since more and more people are giving up looking for work.

The crash has been due since 2008; we can't escape it much longer.

Lets review the usual suspects:
http://www.zerohedge.com/article/meltup ... hun-stocks

Half the public does not even have a dog in the fight. And more wonder why?
Looking under the hood in economics history reveals some indications.
http://www.marketskeptics.com/2010/06/bucket-shops.html
You need to follow the markets on a longer scope of inquiry to see the trees in the forrest.
I still consider Old's relavance to can the center hold comment some time back. Old school does not mean naive.
As GD points out clearly if there x amount of owls there are y amount of prey.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Correlation_and_dependence In math it was what I found easier in a personal attribute to apply to effects.
"statistical relationships involving dependence."

I remembered Rick thoughts and our paradox inference we touched on recently. Scroll to volatility-paradox.html
http://rick.bookstaber.com/