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With the Superbowl just four days away, here's a Paul Harvey-style story concerning Green Bay Packers quarterback Aaron Rodgers that will tug the heartstrings, even, of hard-core Steelers fans.  Click here for the full story, written by a sports anchor from Fox 6 in Milwaukee.

In a report just sent to his clients, our friend Chuck Cohen says "Gold share bottom coming into view.  Be prepared to take action!"  For the full report, click here.  And if you'd like to receive Chucks reports directly, or to inquire about his consulting services, click here. .

Our friend, colleague and charter Pivoteer Sean Rakhimov, an astute observer of the bullion world, is out with a very bullish forecast for Silver.  Don't take this correction too seriously, he says, since 2010's highs are not going to endure. One force that will be pushing prices to new highs is the emergence of some new sovereign buyers.  For the complete interview, click here.

A friend of mine is a top trading system developer. I asked him for his thoughts on high-speed trading, and he responded as follows: "Without really diving into the entire issue with both feet, my random comments would not do justice to this topic. I write code, not books, as you know. I might say that Goldman Sachs (GS) is not the only player in the box. If Sergey Aleynikov [a former Goldman employee accused of stealing trading software] could get code out of Goldman, there are probably others. I'd hate to be on the (GS) receiving end of a really dedicated counter-predatory 'market harvester.'  I doubt that the markets will become the war zone with collateral damage with the magnitude that [some believe].  [Hedge fund] LTCM had Nobel laureates on board and they blew up. "High frequency trading (HFT) is the most profitable category on Wall Street right now, however.  News is still moving the markets, and machine-readable news can be hooked up to algos. By the way:  GS does not have our algo unless they are stealing patents.  We make this algo [commercially] available to ALL traders, and we are not alone. Circuit breakers will probably increase in use and regulation will probably increase. "Regulators are not real happy with GS, in my humble opinion.  The Bloomberg-tapping trader in Bermuda shorts trading FOREX is simply being replaced by the shorts-wearing FOREX trader running his own personal algo. More sudden market moves have happened due to fat-fingered errors than algos. The leverage unwind set upon us by us helping people get into houses that they could not afford has hurt us more than GS's algos. We can do much by voting in leaders that have common sense. Who really wanted to 'Equalize Housing' in an unequal world? "My advice: Work hard, act

An essay by MarketWatch's Brett Arends on the collusion between Government and Wall Street is the must-read of the month. Click here to access the superb essay from which the following was excerpted: "This was the year America finally took on the power and greed of the Wall Street banks. "And the banks won. "They dodged the bullet of real reform, probably for all time. They bounced back to post huge profits, helped by legal theft from the middle class. They completed their takeover of both political parties — and bought themselves a new Congress even more pliable than the old one."

The 21st century will resemble nothing so much as the 12th century, according to a fascinating essay forwarded to us by Jonathan Auerbach of Auerbach & Grayson.  The essay appeared recently in the Financial Times and was written by a friend of Jonathan's, Parag Phanna. "Unlike almost everything else you've read by the many pundits provoking you with their year-end view for the future," notes Jonathan, "this rich and readable piece doesn't once mention inflation, deflation, deficits, PIGS, BRICS, or any of the other cliched verbal currency pitched at us lately. Parag apprehends your scrambled cyclical assumptions and firmly yanks you out of that vortex to recognize the secular implications with which we deal. He eloquently articulates the historical wellspring of our more pedestrian and prosaic view of the advent of the levelling of the global economic and social playing field."   Click here to access the essay.

Although buying put options to hedge against a stock market disaster is almost never a good idea, there are other ways to protect one’s portfolio that risk only small change. One tactic is to “butterfly” combinations of put or call options that are far-out-of-the-money. In this 40-minute impromptu tutorial, Rick demonstrates some of the ways this can be done right now to guard against the possibility that the current correction in gold and silver will turn into something prolonged and nasty.

Earlier today, I received from our friend Andy Maguire, a London bullion dealer, some very interesting notes concerning the precious metals market, which was hit hard this week.  Although I posted the full text of Andy's message in the chat room early Wednesday morning, I am unable at the moment to find the material archived.  For those of you who missed it the first time, or who want to save a copy, here it is again: "I just got back on the platform yesterday and am in meetings for a couple of days as we catch up with clients and kick off the buying for 2011. I will get into the chat room before NFP on Friday though. In the interim we are back in strong buy mode again, already started to layer into this naked unbacked paper selling. The end of year thin traded holidays going into xmas was the first year in the decade where my stink bids didn't get hit. Usually the balance of power shifts to the HFT outfits in the thin conditions where the stops are chased both sides. That didn't happen to any degree, especially on the short side, which is very telling. Other than day trading short silver and gold had to wait for the Boyz to get back to work yesterday. (Monday was a holiday in UK Europe etc.) "This is just a  bluff poker hand and by the time we get through NFP they are going to be called. Embedded shorts are going to have to cover or suffer a royal religious experience. All we are seeing is the same old washing cycle active so that the bullion banks can cover. However the lines cross very close to here so any benefit gained by flushing out the visible stops will be lost as new real strong hands pick their

Our colleague Bob Bronson sees a nasty divergence developing between the S&P 500 and its Advance/Decline Volume Line.  Click here for charts and his explanation.