Notice that crude at a current $68 per barrel has made no upward progress in nearly 20 years. Adjusting for inflation, producers have taken a big hit. However, the quadrupling of oil prices in the early 1970s left them with a base price that ensured that no Saudi prince would ever go begging for a fleet of Lamborghinis in every color of the rainbow. Although the pattern shown is bullish and allows for a move to $125, or even to $187 (!), we have little to gain speculating on when prices might break out of the constipated, $30 range that has confined them for the last three years. Crude oil, the largest, most politically rigged market in the known universe, is, to repeat, 'just a trade'. ______ UPDATE (Oct 27): And what about prices breaking downward? This will depend on when a global financial bust that has been postponed since the S&L crisis of the early 1990s comes barreling along. There is no predicting when this will occur, but when it finally does, it will crush demand for oil, along with its price. For now, though, even when prices are falling, they are relatively strong, considering that China's economy has gone slack. Their demand for fuel is what sets oil's price at the margin, One could infer that it is mainly incalculable geopolitical risks that have kept the price of crude from crashing, and bears from amassing large short positions.
Wall Street has gone all-in for Trump, piling up such extravagant gains in the last few weeks that one might wonder what bold miracles investors expect of him. More likely, unfortunately, is that within a year or two of taking office, he will be overwhelmed by the collapse of a financial bubble that required only the hubris of America's promised return to greatness to set it in motion. Let's hope Mr. Trump gets a chance to clean house first, since Washington is a rat's nest of corruption and plots to bring down America. In the meantime, there is no arguing that the rampaging stock market has got it wrong in predicting that Harris, along with the malignant political philosophy and crackpot schemes she represents, will be overwhelmingly repudiated by voters on November 5. With a gusher of mail-in ballots already pouring in and millions of illegals ready to lend their signatures to the Democrats, it could take weeks or longer to adjudicate the results. Regardless, Trump is riding a wave so powerful that even if the Democrats double the cheating that won them the White House in 2020, they will still come up short. Liberals should listen to Harris's recent interview on Fox with Bret Baier to understand why she can't possibly win. She comes across as so empty and insipid that a conservative could almost wax nostalgic for Hillary's evil cunning and brass cojones. 'A Small Price to Pay' The biggest problem Trump will inherit lies in the Middle East, not Ukraine. He and Putin are neither friends nor enemies but seem to respect each other. This cannot be said of jihadis Trump must confront and what remains of their leadership. Israel has wiped out the terrorists' command structure, and we should expect them to try desperately to settle
[I can’t stomach news reports that take Kamala Harris’s candidacy seriously, especially articles suggesting with brazen implausibility that she is polling dead-even with Trump in some important swing states. Fortunately for those creeped out by all the tilted campaign coverage, my colleague James Howard Kunstler has compressed everything you need to know about the election into a bold, Menckenesque essay that will dazzle you with its insightfulness. He offers three scenarios, two of which could bring America to the brink of civil war. Fortunately, the third, a Trump landslide, seems the most likely and would give Americans a chance to snuff Deep State for good before it can recover from the blow. With Jim’s kind permission, here is Kamala Unwinding, his latest Clusterfuck Nation essay on substack. RA] *** “. . . we are facing a catastrophic collapse of governance. With democracy reduced to a tragedy or a farce (probably both things). . . .” — Ugo Bardi <<<<< >>>>> “As the US increasingly resembles ancient Rome, being president is more and more dangerous. Something around 35 emperors met violent deaths, most from people in and around their courts. In other words, members of the Roman Deep State. An ugly situation is brewing in and around Washington DC.” — Doug Casey ***** Don’t kid yourself: Kamala Harris does not want to be President of the United States. She doesn’t even want the ceremonial stuff, the incessant shuffling from one photo op to the next, the tedious Easter egg rolls, the prayer meetings, the turkey pardonings, the tiresome state banquets for men in strange headgear who are unfamiliar with using the fork and knife, and forbidden to sip chardonnay. . . . It’s obvious she has been played for a chump, that she was sandbagged into play-acting “the candidate” by an
November Crude climbed almost precisely to the 78.39 rally target I air-mailed to you last Sunday, topping at 78.46 before plunging a brutal $7. No one mentioned this in the chat room besides DJI, let alone crowed about making money on it, so I will be dropping crude from the core list of touts to get the list down to a more manageable seven symbols. As always, I will gladly furnish timely guidance when requested in the chat for those who trade this vehicle. The chart shows the comfy, $20 range in which crude has been screwing the pooch for more than two years. Presumably, DaBoyz are waiting for the perfect opportunity to short-squeeze quotes to $90 or higher. This will happen; it is only a matter of when. We can hope it is not caused by an escalation of the developing and so-far-tolerable Third World War. It is saying something about capitalism in its manifestly advanced state of decadence, and about civilization itself, that the world's largest commodity market is just one, gigantic game on the global midway, rigged for the benefit of a relative few at the great expense of all humanity.
The futures spent the whole week sucking the marrow from bears with a shallow, stubborn correction. One might think this would set up a fearsome rally, and there is that possibility. Regardless, we should keep a close eye on price action at the 5868.50 Hidden Pivot target of the pattern shown as we attempt to get short there in the usual way -- i.e., via a small-pattern reverse trigger (aka 'camouflage'). The pattern is one more example of an 'ABCD' that is too obvious to work precisely but which cannot fail to show stopping power that is tradable, however laboriously. Bears shouldn't grow too discouraged if the mindless herd plows through the target, since there is another, potentially even more daunting, 'hidden' resistance at 5906.25. That's the midpoint pivot, on the monthly chart, of A= 4310.50 (10/31/23).
See Friday's chat room discussion for a detailed explanation of a 33.23 forecast for this vehicle last Wednesday that caught the top of Friday's spike high and a so-far 94-cent plunge within half a penny -- a single tick. One contract shorted at the top could have produced a gain of as much as $4700 in a little more than two hours. Looking just ahead, I have used a daily chart (click on thumbnail inset) to project a 33.505 target for the next thrust. Although a pullback from Friday's high that touches the red line (p=32.33, a midpoint Hidden Pivot), would trigger a 'mechanical' buy, I am recommending that you attempt this only at the green line, and only if you know how to use a 'camouflage' trigger to cut the $3000 theoretical entry risk by 85%-90%. _______ UPDATE (Oct 8, 12:22 p.m.): The selling has turned ugly this morning, crushing d=30.565 (daily chart a=30.670 on 8/26). The futures are screwing the pooch now after having marginally penetrated the p support of a pattern that projects to as low as 27.65(!) As of the moment, however, the bunco artists who engineered today's shakedown may be able to do no worse than mildly breaching p=30.438. Here's a chart that shows it all.
If you can keep a cool head while everyone around you is panicking, perhaps you don't understand the situation. That's what they say, anyway. It is exactly what we saw last week when stocks barely shrugged even as the shooting war in the Middle East took another baby step toward nuclear conflagration. The oil markets certainly recognized the danger, spiking sharply after our titular president warned that Israeli warplanes might soon start targeting Iran's refineries. Energy quotes scored their biggest weekly gain in years while stocks, although relatively subdued, appeared to consolidate for yet another psychotic upthrust. What seemed to matter most on Wall Street was not the threat of cities going up in flames, but a few meaningless, cooked job stats implying that droplets of juice from America's financial bacchanal have begun to trickle into the parched gullets of gig workers, nurses and cocktail waitresses (if not yet retail clerks). Longshoremen could join them shortly with a 62% raise to $69 an hour, including the union's legendary no-shows. It's a little late in the Kondratief cycle for them to become rentiers, but the prospect of owning a few shares of Nvidia seems realistic enough. Although keeping up with the Joneses has gotten easier because the Joneses' inflation-adjusted net worth has been stagnant for 50 years, chasing inflation has only grown harder. And that's measured against phony data that understate inflation by half. Take heart, all you working stiffs: beating inflation is going to be a cakewalk when the next recession brings it down to, like, minus five percent. What About Microsoft? Speaking of recession, this IBM chart, even to the unschooled eye, suggests the Beamer may be about to reverse in a big way. Although I have never tracked the company's shares closely, there may be a few old-timers
The pattern shown makes the 5868.50 target look like it can't miss. But it will, if not by much. It is too obvious a picture to yield a precise top and a sharp pullback from D that causes permabears to dance in the streets. Everyone is aware of this ABCD, even the math majors, and the mere anticipation of its final gasp is all but certain to queer D's voodoo stopping-power. But the pattern's Newtonian heft is also compelling -- so much so that the futures are unlikely to get past D without a struggle if at all. One thing that is all but certain is that D is going to be reached before the Fat Lady can sing. The way buyers fisted p=5518.75 the first time they encountered this midpoint Hidden Pivot tells us that. Whatever happens, we'll be looking to short a topping process rather than a top. Stay close to the chat room and keep your email 'Notifications' turned on if you don't fancy being outsmarted by this creaky ship of fools.
TLT's tortuous ascent still looks bound for 105.49, a Hidden Pivot target derived from a bull cycle that dates back to October 2023, when this proxy for the long bond was trading around 82. A corresponding fall in long-term rates would bring them down to 3.64%. The trajectory of both charts suggests the targets could be reached by late this year or early in 2025. It is logical to infer that a recession would be well under way with rates at those levels since the Fed could not conceivably force them down by purchasing massive amounts of Treasury debt. Foreigners could do the job for them if there is a global flight to safety for reasons beyond imagining,
I've hauled out a long-term chart commensurate with the ones displayed alongside this week's gold and silver touts. It shows GDXJ to be slightly ahead of the futures in a precious-metals bull market that has years to run. A close look at the rightmost bar reveals that it has slightly pierced the midpoint Hidden Pivot resistance of a pattern projecting to 72.73, a 45% move from here. With one more day to go in September, there's a good chance the monthly close will be above p. A second close above the pivot in October would shorten the odds that 72.73 will be achieved, but so would an upthrust to 54 or higher. That target is not the highest possible using the monthly chart; a reverse-pattern objective of 111.59 is arguable, using a= 84.72 from 2/26/10.
