The Morning Line

[This week's commentary was written by  David J. Isham a longtime subscriber to Rick's Picks. A real estate investor and trader, David lives with his family in Marin County.] For Americans eager to embrace socialism, China's take on the so-called 15-minute city will warm your hearts. As an urban planning concept, the 15-minute city aims to put all of the usual neighborhood amenities within easy walking distance: grocery stores, parks, urgent care centers, banks, movie theaters, etc. Sounds like a great idea, right?  However, in the Peoples Republic of China, the government has been adding a digital innovation that Chairman Mao would have loved: scanners that require one to submit a QR code in order to move around. If you live in one of the newly wired cities and have criticized government policy on social media, or you haven’t received your latest booster shot, your impaired social credit score will prevent you from leaving your neighborhood zone. Could it happen in the U.S.? Arguably, the idea had a test run when many Americans and their elected leaders clamored for vaccination passports and all kinds of access restrictions for the un-jabbed.  Fortunately, the former never came to pass and the latter did not spread into the American heartland. However, if implementing a social credit system were to be placed on a national ballot, does anyone doubt that it would garner almost as many votes as Biden supposedly received in the 2020 election?  Tune in to the discussion at @songpinganq on Twitter if you want a glimpse of what you may someday be up against. Seeking Out Good Neighbors Although a grim future is not set in stone, I've thought about a time when my children might not be allowed to work, to attend college or even enter a grocery store without

Americans grew effortlessly richer last week when a two-day rally in stocks and bonds added many hundreds of billions of instantly spendable dollars to the economy. Most of it would have dropped into the hands of traders, speculators and portfolio managers. However, enough will trickle down to sales reps at Bijan, Dolce & Gabbana and Bulgari that the big-ticket binge eventually will turn up as GDP growth.  AAPL, a Bellagio fountain of liquid wealth, added perhaps $90 billion all by itself when it rose 3.5% on Friday. Not too shabby, considering the rally stemmed almost entirely from short-covering rather than bullish buying. How do we know this? Simply because the fleeting, shallow pullbacks the entire way up evinced the mini mood-swings, from hopefulness to despair to capitulation, that bears exhibit when things are not going their way. Glimpsed on the intraday chart above, the rhythms of the water-drip torture they endured for two days are as distinctive and ominous as atrial fibrillation on an EKG tape. AAPL's rally was more decapitation than torture, with at least 80% of it occurring in the first hour on gossamer volume.   Exhaustion Spike   We continue to view the uptrend as a bear-market fake, implying it is incapable of achieving new all-time highs. But it could get close enough to scare the hell out of bears, and that's exactly what it will do if they continue to fight it. Such battles tend to end with an exhaustion spike, followed by a headline reaction to the downside. The sudden revival of the bear market begun in January 2022 promises to be a doozy. Although Papa Bear's initial phase, which lasted ten months, lopped 22% from the value of the Dow Industrials, it lacked the climactic selling that would have signaled that the worst was

Uranium investments topped the list of exciting takeaways from the Mines & Money conference held in Miami last week. Keynote speaker Chris Temple, editor of The National Investor, dispelled nagging doubts about atomic power's future when he noted that Greta 'How-dare-you!' Thunberg has been distancing herself from fellow activists who remain vociferously opposed to nuclear energy. She may be an insufferable scold, but there is no denying that she is also a top global influencer of environmentalists. Try Googling just 'Greta' if you need to be convinced; it is not fellow Swede Garbo whose biography pops up. Thunberg has very publicly urged Germany not to decommission its few remaining reactors this year as planned. She is hardly alone in having recognized belatedly that nuclear power is the only economically viable alternative to carbon-based fuels. With the Fukushima disaster of 2011 receding from memory, Japan and South Korea have finally seen the light, joining the U.S, U.K., Belgium, Finland, Poland, Czech Republic, Romania and others in their growing appetite for reactor-based power. Two Growth Pathways Look for the nuclear industry's growth to unfold mainly along two pathways created by 1) burgeoning demand from industrialized nations for large power stations in the 1000-gigawatt category; and 2) correspondingly robust demand from hundreds of cities and communities for small, modular N-plants that can recycle radioactive fuel pellets. John Borchoff,  managing director of a company called Deep Yellow [OTC: DYLLD] that is focused on Namibian ore, sees his firm as particularly well positioned to benefit from these trends. As demand for uranium grows, he says, buyers will seek out the biggest, most reliable producers to meet their needs. Smaller miners will get bought up by the relative handful of companies capable of delivering at least two million pounds of uranium per year. Deep Yellow is

Get AAPL right and you get the stock market right. That has been our mantra for years, and it has never failed us. Apple shares and the broad averages are unlikely to go their separate ways because so many portfolio managers regard the stock as they do their Patek Phillippe wristwatches: something to pass on to the next generation.  Even the Sage of Omaha, who reportedly moved back into AAPL in a big way recently, seems to have a jones for the company. So what is AAPL saying now?  Fix your eyes on the chart above and it’s easy to imagine the steep, 25% rally since January reversing when it hits the trendline. That's the way picture-perfect channels are supposed to work. The resistance will come in at around 167 this week, a daunting 16 points shy of early 2022's summit at 183. Suspect the Obvious However, any time a chart speaks so clearly, alarm bells should go off. For what looks like a simple picture is often more devious and complex than a three-way showdown in a spaghetti western. Were it otherwise, every chartist would retire rich at 40.  So whenever we look at a graph that seems to spell everything out for us, realize that the stock is calculating how to screw everyone.  In this case there would appear to be three distinctly different possibilities: 1) the rally fails right here or perhaps somewhat above, giving way to the ruinous implosion of a $2.5 trillion company; 2) heedless buyers impale the trendline within the next month or so , launching AAPL into the firmament; or 3) the stock wanders in the desert for 40 years, or at least until no trader cares about the channel any longer. A bullish outcome or even a lengthy period of indecision seem

Only on Wall Street is fake news celebrated with such shameless hubris as we've seen lately. In the last few weeks, flouting a torrent of lousy earnings reports, investors have gorged themselves on stocks.  This resurgence, doomed by recession and a grim outlook for earnings, was strongly supported by fake, or at least meaningless, employment data showing strong payroll growth. Never mind that most of the newly re-employed were waitresses, shoe store clerks and cruise-ship saxophonists who got laid off during the pandemic. Now they'll be able to pay the rent again with their own money rather than with taxpayer handouts -- a modest gain that economists, Biden and his remaining few stalwarts would herald as evidence of boom times. Let's not dwell in the meantime on the fact that high-paying tech jobs have been shrinking at a disturbing rate -- by 32,000 in just the last month. None of this was even faintly on Biden's mind, such as it is, when he served up a State of the Union address last week telling us why it is once again Morning in America. In reality, U.S. data alleging 3% GDP growth in the last two quarters conflicts sharply with widespread perceptions that the economy remains mired in a recession begun early last year. The eggheads are so deeply in denial about this that they have returned to laughable speculation about whether America can 'avoid' recession. Signs of Decline But no matter how many jobs are added, and however inflated the stock market and real estate become, the things that determine our standard of living will continue to erode or disappear, just as they've been doing since the 1970s. Who doubts, for one, that the day is coming when the last department store closes its doors, leaving us to do most

Treat the stock market as you would a sleazy carnival game and you hold the key to accurately predicting its behavior. Take AAPL, for instance. We should have known that permabears were being set up for a fleecing when an always-complicit news media worked slavishly to stoke anticipation of horrendous Q4 earnings. Apple certainly didn't disappoint in that regard when the company on Thursday reported its first year-over-year sales decline since 2019. Such announcements are usually made after the close, enabling the thieves who manipulate stock prices for a living to work their magic. As they have done countless times in the past, they pulled their bids in after-hours trading following Apple's grim announcement. This induced widows and pensioners to vomit Apple shares at distress prices five percent below where they'd traded on the close. QE Mythology With sellers utterly spent, DaBoyz were easily able to short-squeeze the stock back up to the intraday high within hours. The rigged ups and downs that made this ruse work are shown in this chart. From that point forward, their clown-dunking antics were on autopilot. As the stock relapsed in the wee hours, they covered shorts laid out at Thursday evening's secondary peak. Sellers didn't realize how badly they'd been had until around 5 a.m., when AAPL finished basing on near-zero volume and launched into an 8% rally, from 145 to 157, before the regular session began. QE mythology aside, this is how the Fed effectively injects large sums of instantly spendable money into the economy. With credit stimulus there will always be a lag between falling interest rates and their intended effect on consumer spending. But gift investors/consumers with an 8% rally in the world's biggest-cap stock on a Friday afternoon and you have spiked the wealth effect with methamphetamine. By the

[This week's commentary was written by David Isham, a real estate investor from Northern California who has subscribed to Rick's Picks since its inception more than 20 years ago. RA ] With the ongoing financial turmoil and the potential start of another world war, gold is behaving as we would expect, showing exceptional strength. Although we are nowhere near the top as open interest is still low, we still must be on the lookout for a short-term top. The gold bull has traditionally carried as few riders higher as possible, and I suspect this time will not be any different. Rick has identified targets above $2,000, and there are two peaks at $2078 where there will be plenty of buy stops for the algos to run and establish short positions. If they do run the buy-stops, they would then look to attack sell-stops under $1,600 so that they could cover profitably and get long again. A long-term Fibonacci fan (aka 'speed resistance lines') with a red 2/3 line has acted as both resistance and support since this bull market started in 2001 and would be a likely target on the downside. Such a dramatic move would also set up a slingshot move to the upside. If we do get one more, dramatic move down I would also expect gold stocks to hold up well relative to physical. My strategy is to accumulate gold and silver mining stocks and not try to time buying and selling my core positions, since I could get left behind if I am wrong about a big drop. However, any large move down would be an opportunity to add to my positions. A Golden Slingshot Martin Armstrong does not think the US dollar will last beyond 2028. It has the distinction of being the only currency

The chart is meant to put Friday's giddy short-squeeze in perspective. If you are a bull and feeling a little discouraged by what you see, that is what I had intended. What better time to rack bears than in the final hours of a week that was more comic relief than hard news? Biden's docugate was outed entertainingly by Tucker Carlson as a not particularly sinister plot by 'Permanent Washington' to make certain that the thieving, senile old coot doesn't run again. It also has the beauty of allowing many Democrats and even a few Republicans to evade discussion of far more serious crimes that would implicate them all in shadier misdeeds than misplacing classified documents. In this temporary climate of political unseriousness, the S&P 500 was aggressively stoked to Mau-Mau bears, lest they become cocksure about the extremely dim prospect of new all-time highs with recession-or-worse stalking the U.S. and global economies. Eggheads in Denial Incredibly, the eggheads, including a few Nobelists, remain in denial that a U.S. recession has even begun. The stock market is not so stupid and may even have begun to recognize that lower inflation could be leading to an economically fatal debt deflation.  How else to explain the headless-chicken feints in both directions on news that prices for some things are coming down, if much more slowly than they rose?  Like the keister bandits who control bitcoin's price, the svengalis of Battle Creek have seized on markets numbed by chaos to jack cereal prices six ways from Sunday. For instance, the 16-ounce box of Cheerios that once sold for $4.70 is now a 14-ounce box for $6.99. If you think the trend has gone far enough, be careful what you wish for, since, in the unimaginably hard times that may lie ahead, we could

The headline explains why the voracious bounders on Capitol Hill are willing to spend so much time, money and effort getting re-elected. For they are not just investment insiders, they are recidivist sponsors of legislation that directly benefits their stock portfolios. It is quite a racket, and whatever laws exist to prevent them from getting rich serving corporate lobbyists above all, those laws obviously are not working.  If you're interested in the sordid details behind their headline-worthy investment success, a website called UnusualWhales publishes an annual report filled with titillating information. "By analyzing publicly accessible financial disclosures," the Whale's authors proclaim, "we found that a quarter of Congress actively traded up to $788M in various assets through 12,700+ transactions in 2022. Although this matches the number of transactions in 2021, the total value has dropped." I was unaware of Unusual Whales' efforts to shine a light on our nation's political cockroaches until my brother, Allen, sent me a link to their site. "For me, reading the headline Congress Outperforms S&P in 2022 was all the clickbait I needed," he wrote. "While it's my habit to look for the best in people, I eagerly make an exception for all politicians. The loftier their position, the greater my skepticism. To temper my deep disdain for them, I try to remember the old adage that it's only 98% of them that give the rest a bad name. Their Favorite Plays  "Admittedly,' he continued, "the report is too long for me to read at one sitting -- think Tolstoy -- and although I don't think it will provide any revelations, it makes for fascinating reading nonetheless.  Imbibe just the opening paragraphs and you'll see how the greed of Republicans and Democrats run on somewhat different tracks.  The top sectors with the highest stock investments