Did y'all ever notice how little it takes to strip away your veneer of civilization? For me, a rainy autumn day with the wild wet smell of Tennessee woods works just as well as a sunny spring day. If they didn't chain my ankle to this computer, I'd be as scarce around here as Big Foot. I'd run wild in the woods, eat hickory nuts, and drink from the creeks, but here I am so let's talk about markets. (Don't even talk about playing bag pipes or banjo music. Do that, and I'll break the chain.) Mercy, you'd be in a mess if you had to trade currencies for a living. Today the Franken-currency is trading as I write at 1.3784, down a gigantic 0.01. That doesn't quite paint the picture, though, because it spent most of its day lower, low as 1.3685. Now maybe it was just filling that gap it left two days ago, or maybe its bouncing off that lower boundary of the range whence it broke down. Either way, y'all can HAVE my helping of the euro. I can't abide the taste of it. Yen barely traded today, but last traded at 130.13c/Y100 (Y76.85/$1), up 0.53% and almost enough to read on the chart that it moved. US DOLLAR INDEX today sidled between 77.433 & 76.843. Can't argue that 77.40 slapped its jaws, but not too bad. Dollar's holding tight to 77, but as I've been saying, even if it slides to 76, it has in mind to climb above 80. That may take a while to unfold, but it will come. Only a bad fall below 76 would change my mind. Mercy! 'Tis awfully easy to let your eyes slip off the horizon & let today's events cloud your mind. The air of unthreatened calm that hangs over us here is a falsehood. I reckon we're like men working in a TNT factory: everything's all right until some fool strikes a match. Tomorrow I'm going to send y'all some suggestions for securing a little more peace of mind. STOCKS spent the day contradicting themselves. The Nasdaq & Nasdaq 100 rose, while the senior indices fell. Pattern of trading was altogether different. Nasdaq & N-100 fiddled, then about 11:30 took off upside & gained most of the day. Dow & S&P500 stayed underwater all day, and only drew nigh the surface near day's end. Dow closed at 11,478.13, down 40.75 or 0.35%. S&P 500 lost 3.59 (0.3%) to 1,203.66. I know lots of folks are singing that the Dow will rally from here, and it may, but it's having a hard time crawling out of the congestion area posted since the August waterfall. STOCKS -- they are the iron life-jacket Wall Street throws to Main Street, drowning in confusion. What might happen if my interpretation of silver & gold right now is all wrong? What if they've already bottomed, & I've launched myself on another fool's errand, waiting for 'em to drop a little lower? Might be. We'll know that for sure if gold trades above $1,800 & stays. Silver's so volatile that I don't want to set any target there, just use gold as a trigger. Why am I thinking this way? The Long Run came last night to mind. I hear The Media Mighty saying Gold's career is most likely over, and Silver's most surely, & I scratch my head. Folks don't talk that way at market tops, when you can't find a doubter with a telescope, microscope, & Geiger counter. Nor have silver & gold even matched by a third the last bull market's performance. Nor have any of the causes boosting silver & gold changed. Have any of y'all heard the Federal Reserve will be abolished? That the yankee government will stop trying to run the economy & stop waging wars around the world to make everybody nice like us? Naww, y'all haven't heard any of that, so none of the causes have changed. Thus I confess I am playing a perilous game, holding out for lower prices -- lower by a few percentage points, even 15%, when I expect silver & gold to treble or quadruple from here. But for all that, markets have been teaching me for years -- with a barbed wire whip to make the lesson sink in -- that sometimes patience & waiting prove wisest. But y'all need not feel obliged to copy my bad, natural-born- fool example. You might decide, with good reason, that you'd rather trust silver or gold than to leave you money in those Mothers of All Monetary Mischief & Larceny, the banks. I won't gainsay you a minute. Today, once again, gold failed to break through $1,675 - $1,680. It's narrowed its range some, and twice defended a $1,655 low. And today's high at $1,681.50 climbed a leetle higher than Monday's, but that's not breaking through resistance. That's failing. I expect tomorrow will show lower prices, and a lot lower if gold breaks $1,653. On the topside, watch $1,680 resistance. Moving Average Convergence Divergence (MACD) is calling for higher gold. On the Comex today, where the black shirts take no prisoners, gold dropped $14 to close at $1,667.30. Silver's chart resembles gold's only a little wilder. 3300c resistance has again corralled and hogtied silver. Silver never fell below 3144.4c, but by the time they rang that Comex bell, it has lost 112.1c to 3163.3c. Whole day was one long decline. Maybe silver & gold are carving out new trading ranges, $1,650 to $1,682 and 3140c to 3300c. Maybe, but if they fall below those levels, we face more frustrating range trading or new lows. On 13 October 1812 American forces invading Canada were defeated at the Battle of Queenstown Heights. What in the world were they thinking? Was there no snow, no ice in the US? Were there no breweries? Why in the world would they invade Canada? I'm glad that's over. And the Canadians are lucky they won, otherwise the American would have made them just like us. MILESTONES OF AMERICAN CULTURE: On 13 October 1947, not even five months after I was born, the TV show "Kukla, Fran, & Ollie" appeared. The show was not scripted but entirely ad-libbed, which you might have noticed had you watched closely. Fran was a pretty comedienne. Kukla was a rednosed puppet, and Ollie (Oliver J. Dragon) was a one-toothed dragon puppet. Today's viewers would probably find it dull, as neither the puppets nor Fran had super powers, transformed into a yellow front-end loader, or ran for congress. Neither did their conversation even HINT at anything off color. Nope, today you wouldn't even recognized it as television. All were fully clothed at all times. Y'all won't believe this, but I was working at home today & got a phone call from Nielsen, the company that tracks TV viewership. Nice lady asked me how much TV I watched and I said -- nicely, now -- I said there wasn't anything I wanted to watch. She asked if she could send me a notebook to track my TV watching for a week, & I said, sure, if it's got asbestos pages & you don't mind my writing down what I really think, minus the cusswords. She was very sweet, but those folks have no idea who they're messing with.
Argentum et aurum comparanda sunt —
Silver and gold must be bought.
— Franklin Sanders, The Moneychanger
|
