Friday, June 29, 2012

The Wrong Kind of Certainty To Be Sure


It was the short squeeze heard 'round the world. Yet apparently for good reason JP Morgan Chase went AWOL. There's probably plenty of exposure [directly and/or indirectly] tied to Portugal, Ireland and Greece to name three reasons. Why there a growing mass strike could instantly turn violent if the euro is not abandoned immediately. And why wouldn't these nations test the presently unfunded ESM making such a threat, this a la Spain and Italy today? Why not prove bailout either a hopeless cause or sufficient that much better terms can be squeezed?

For now a transfer of no ESM capital (because it does not yet exist) directly into insolvent European banks obviously leaves these banks insolvent just the same. A counter-party problem for JPM (and the rest of the trans-Atlantic) in the making to be sure. Nevertheless, suckers who lined up today after Chicago did its deed simply are not listening, which is as it should be just prior to disaster.




You can take this to the bank: what you see circled above is the wrong kind of certainty. This strongly one-sided variety typically is abused subsequently, and usually with little time in waiting.

All the same, my recent view supposing a 2nd wave of five waves down from this year's peak probably continues unfolding was confirmed today. The Elliott wave form this corrective wave is taking, however, now is more so in question. Yesterday's "running correction" could be today's "double zig-zag," say, if you're looking at the NYSE Composite Index. Suffice for now that, it's quite possible a slightly different Elliott wave count applied to the major indexes finds all still well poised for a jaw dropping thumping starting any minute now.

Still more technical evidence indicates the wrong kind of certainty today was chasing stocks, and leaves no doubt this is how garbage is offloaded when the risk of its sudden burial is enormous...


$NYHL

The darlings of globalization, no doubt, led the charge today. These, like Nike, are the impending victims of hyperinflationary breakdown, whose number might be thought growing over the past couple years inversely to the diminishing number of NYSE-listed issues hitting new 52-week highs as each new hyperinflationary lifeline issued by increasingly insolvent lenders of last resort has taken effect.

That circumstance above reveals a technical state similar to last July is moderately interesting to say the least. Plus there's the matter finding the market's degradation from peak to trough this year relatively more substantial than that from May-June 2011 — this being confirmed by the NYSE new 52-week high-low differential, as well — yet the NYSE Composite Index here still is well-short even of its June 2011 low, thus exposing the true "strength" of the NYSE's leaders. In other words, theirs likely is a funeral in waiting. No coattails is no animal spirits, and without these the market is dead to be sure.

Indeed, today's certainty more likely is entirely misguided. Were some juice of any quantity to come from Team Fraud's pass given to Spain and Italy today, then just as occurred prior to the acronym LTRO becoming the hyperinflationary flavor of the day with capacity to fake the trans-Atlantic banking system's solvency for at least some weeks, thereby allowing more garbage to be offloaded to its lovers, a disguised, doubt-seeded technical state like that late-November 2011 probably would have instead resulted today. An "all is well!" rather quite like last July's is a different animal altogether whose presence here is perfectly fitting a market poised to unravel.


$NYA

Man, it looks a lot like last July. But more of the wrong kind of certainty is displayed with the NYSE Composite index today gapping above both its 200- and 50-day moving averages, this while a measure of the index's momentum (MACD: see bottom panel) still remains to the negative side of its range. In fact, you might want to look back to April. Notice any similarity to June? A decline worst than May's might very well be knocking at the door.

Just for fun take a tour of the too bankrupt to save financials (in fantasy land these are called "too big to fail" ... otherwise today's name for tyranny, a truth becoming rather well-known in both Europe and the United States). In fact GS, MS, BAC, and C appear in great position to find JPM's difficulty all the more their own. You might say rapidly accelerating demands on an unfunded European bailout facility appear priced into these [badly languishing] shares. Not yet factored, though, is today's elevated risk that, Portugal and/or Ireland and/or Greece might default and collapse the EMU, not to mention what full disclosure of the Spanish and Italian bailout need whose sum likely dwarfs the present ESM capital commitment might mean to the shred of confidence keeping financials in the game of make believe whose fading credibility spells "bond vigilante." The TBTS, indeed, all appear well-poised for a rude awakening, and this is no strange coincidence. A day saturated with the wrong kind of certainty finds fearsome truth in foreboding company, which could make JPM the derivatives king whose desperate search for solvent counter-parties ultimately was behind today's euro-gimme-lest-the-whole-shebang-collapse-this-weekend.

(p.s. "Fair and balanced" truly was CNBC's "Options Action" tonight — click the icon below to watch it. And about today's outsized gains in commodities reaching upward of 10% in some cases: remember, leverage runs on a two-way street, which fact hovers like a dark, ominous cloud over a posse of bond vigilantes whose approach is set to bury both Tina and Bernice, along with many other stinking piles of garbage.)


Fast Money
* * * * *

© The Risk Averse Alert — Advocating a patient, disciplined approach to stock market investing. Overriding objective is limiting financial risk. Minimizing investment capital loss is a priority.

Analysis centers on the stock market's path of least resistance. Long-term, this drives a simple strategy for safely investing a 401(k) for maximum profit. Intermediate-term, investing with stock index tracking-ETFs (both their long and short varieties) is advanced. Short-term, stock index options occasionally offer extraordinary profit opportunities when the stock market is moving along its projected path.

Nothing is set in stone. Nor is the stock market's path of least resistance always known. More often than not, there are no stock index option positions recommended.


There's an easy way to boost your investment discipline...

Get Real-Time Trade Notification!

Thursday, June 28, 2012

Tina and Bernice Doomed by a Race Card


Mario Monti, where did they find you? Have you not been to Greece? Greece is the way! So then a credible threat in Italy's search for market relief is debt write downs, sir, not withheld support for a Tobin tax twenty years too late, or blocking Europe's uber lame growth package.

Can't you see, sir, you're the last little piggy whose game changing place is to go "Wee, all the way home?" Yes sir, to home it is — bankruptcy — to roam in misery with those others of your wiggled herd who go by the names Greece, Ireland, Portugal and Spain. So, Mario, will you grow a pair and demand a write down, or will you be cross-dressing with Bernanke and Geithner, inviting any eloquent flea to teasingly call you Maria?

Don't bother with an answer. We already know. So, too, does Angela, though, which I am sure you are aware. Otherwise you would be acting in a credible manner and not like some bought-and-paid-for buffoon.

Speaking of buffoons, how about those House Democrats playing the race card during today's Contempt of Congress vote against U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder! Someone inform these fools that, African Americans fought for and won their due Civil Rights that justice be served, which is exactly what Congress is seeking to establish in documents the Attorney General has withheld for months, which Windy now claims are off limits by executive privilege, making this his Watergate moment.

So, likening the movie Titanic to today's disgraceful display by a bunch of do-nothing, fraud-facilitating creeps in Congress, we're at the part where First Officer Murdock shoots Fabrizio, then puts the gun to his head and offs himself. Sheer pandemonium. Good luck with that European bailout package, Tina and Bernice!


SPX 5-min

It was a buffoon triple play when explanation given to today's late-day recovery (Bloomberg) was German Chancellor Angela Merkel cancelling her press conference following today's European leaders summit, this apparently to watch the European Championship semi-final match pitting Italy vs. Germany. No word on the size of the euro bond bet at stake between Monti and Merkel, nor whether in this affair another hedge has gone bad for JPM, raising its trading loss beyond today's rumored $9 billion.

This just in from Wiemar: welcome Nike to every global corporation's worst nightmare — rising input costs and no ability to pass them on. Coming to a Wal Mart near you, where, no doubt, Depends (NYSE: KMB) likewise are sold, too. All are darlings bid up by weak hands with Monti, Obama, Tina and Bernice their more than suspect backstop. Going down...


Fast Money
* * * * *

© The Risk Averse Alert — Advocating a patient, disciplined approach to stock market investing. Overriding objective is limiting financial risk. Minimizing investment capital loss is a priority.

Analysis centers on the stock market's path of least resistance. Long-term, this drives a simple strategy for safely investing a 401(k) for maximum profit. Intermediate-term, investing with stock index tracking-ETFs (both their long and short varieties) is advanced. Short-term, stock index options occasionally offer extraordinary profit opportunities when the stock market is moving along its projected path.

Nothing is set in stone. Nor is the stock market's path of least resistance always known. More often than not, there are no stock index option positions recommended.


There's an easy way to boost your investment discipline...

Get Real-Time Trade Notification!

Wednesday, June 27, 2012

The Eve of the New, New Normal


Hold tightly those precious gems whose price today in no way discounts the shock likely to hit bond markets right to the very top of a heap now reaching heaven. When Congress either forces Bernanke to flip the endless QE switch (sans any backstop from Treasury), or write down garbage on the Fed's book (a la Glass-Steagall), suddenly the unthinkable — relentlessly rising rates — stands to become the new, "new normal."


$SPX

The only other thing to say about today's decidedly muted volume is an apparent lack of urgency to sell wildly overpriced garbage probably buys time for trapped weak hands to offload more trash at prices not far from current levels, as these are well above where every bit of it soon will be buried. Thus, continued formation of a 2nd wave of five waves down from this year's peak is probability further raised.

Should the rumor mill go out of business on account of continued German intransigence to imperial schemes venturing to burying it in a Versailles-like arrangement, then pressure applied on Congress in a language spoken fluently there, where every sentence begins and ends with a dollar sign, likely will coincide with the market's collapse to levels last seen in 2009. Then can Congress reply to shrieking incompetents like Volcker who claim Glass-Steagall aims to "punish banks" that, the banks are punishing themselves, as these are the principal owners of every form of garbage whose survival in the current arrangement requires endless bailout. With this the purging of human garbage defending causes promoting national suicide can move into high gear, starting with a murderer the Financial Times of London endorsed for President of the United States.


Fast Money
* * * * *

© The Risk Averse Alert — Advocating a patient, disciplined approach to stock market investing. Overriding objective is limiting financial risk. Minimizing investment capital loss is a priority.

Analysis centers on the stock market's path of least resistance. Long-term, this drives a simple strategy for safely investing a 401(k) for maximum profit. Intermediate-term, investing with stock index tracking-ETFs (both their long and short varieties) is advanced. Short-term, stock index options occasionally offer extraordinary profit opportunities when the stock market is moving along its projected path.

Nothing is set in stone. Nor is the stock market's path of least resistance always known. More often than not, there are no stock index option positions recommended.


There's an easy way to boost your investment discipline...

Get Real-Time Trade Notification!

Tuesday, June 26, 2012

Team Fraud Swan Song


Word has it Team Fraud's top tools in Washington — Geithner and Bernanke — are meeting secretly with leading Congressional Democrats and Republicans, demanding they draft new legislation to bail out the trans-Atlantic banking system on an even larger scale than after the 2008 collapse of the fraud-riddled shadow banking system (the Derivatives Black Hole in these parts known as "Adam Smith's Leveraged Ponzi Scheme"). Apparently bent on proving themselves the spineless jellyfish type, these are the same two men who but mere days ago were claiming Europe has all the resources it needs to independently deal with its debt woes. Maybe someone should organize a clothing drive, that these closet cross-dressers have plenty to wear during the fast approaching collapse of the EMU?

In case these two dunces have not noticed the winds of change blowing in Washington, absent a convulsion commensurately bigger than 2008's, odds of a larger bailout swindle at this point are just about zero. Indeed, the U.S. House of Representatives Republican majority — a party dominated by British Tory clones — is a double curse to bailout junkies hooked on fraud who of late have been working their clown contingent in opposition to reinstatement of Glass-Steagall. Suddenly, the dominance of Democratic party co-sponsors to HR 1489 appears exceedingly foreboding come November.

Just as attempts to gain taxpayer backing in Europe via "fiscal integration" and "banking union" are doomed to fail in lockstep with failure of the fascist austerity regime imposed over the past few years, any attempt to put U.S. taxpayers on the hook to extend fantasy that, current debt burdens are sustainable likely could be met by a social explosion dwarfing anything seen over the interim. Indeed, the cities of New York and Washington could be virtually shut down. 100-1 opposition to 2008's TARP swindle only raises confidence that, dire consequence awaits any redux attempting to extend fantasy claiming the trans-Atlantic banking system in its current, insolvent state can be (and ought to be) "saved."

A panic-stricken, LTRO-like, overtly hyperinflationary fake probably is about all Team Fraud has to look forward to here, as the trans-Atlantic's central banks remain firmly committed to becoming just as hopelessly insolvent as the "banks" these institutions supposedly "regulate." Last week's ECB move to lower the quality of collateral it accepts with a wink and a smile to maintain appearances of the European banking system's solvency for some duration now reduced to but minutes is a trend we now might better expect to accelerate in a manner whose effect likewise will hasten the physical economy's utter collapse over months ahead. It is all these intellectually challenged pricks — slaves to the supremely corrupt rule of money dominating political policy for decades now — have left in their shriveling bag of tricks.


$UST1Y

The will to punish holders of debt whose claims likely will soon meet a hyperinflationary deluge with no hope whatsoever of being taken back (unlike the deluge of the past few years whose "promise" has been its eventual unwind, something Team Fraud's "penetrating" media outlets conveniently fail to mention while pathetically whining for still more of the same) is a rising trend that, in no time likely will dwarf Volcker's devastation meted during his term as Fed chairman in the early 1980s. Bernanke's "Operation Twist" only serves to hasten this effect while having bought some months coercing capital into risk assets, that the banking system's solvency fantasy momentarily be sustained.

The rise of so-called "bond vigilantes" is set to prove the swan song of fools currently occupying the Federal Reserve and the U.S. Treasury. The shutdown of physical production capacity leading to unimaginable shortages in the most basic stuffs vital to sustaining life as we know it — this is hyperinflation, oh Wiemar people of new — all too likely will be the result of foolishness today's slaves to unanchored, valueless money accomplish via pending efforts to continue fantasy claiming a liquidity crisis, rather than the banking system's insolvency, demands the hyperinflationary flood sure to accompany a pending breakout of chaos in Europe, as German resistance to committing national suicide appears intractable.


Fast Money
* * * * *

© The Risk Averse Alert — Advocating a patient, disciplined approach to stock market investing. Overriding objective is limiting financial risk. Minimizing investment capital loss is a priority.

Analysis centers on the stock market's path of least resistance. Long-term, this drives a simple strategy for safely investing a 401(k) for maximum profit. Intermediate-term, investing with stock index tracking-ETFs (both their long and short varieties) is advanced. Short-term, stock index options occasionally offer extraordinary profit opportunities when the stock market is moving along its projected path.

Nothing is set in stone. Nor is the stock market's path of least resistance always known. More often than not, there are no stock index option positions recommended.


There's an easy way to boost your investment discipline...

Get Real-Time Trade Notification!

Monday, June 25, 2012

Sign of the Times


Continuing Friday's shot in the dark [energy market "What?"] are compelling matters crushing related equities...




By the sounds of it there probably is a decent energy long trade setting up. Returning to Friday's $WTIC chart, a positive move that technically repairs steeply descending momentum (see PPO, top panel) is circumstance fitting the decided, across-the-board negativity Cramer noticed over the weekend in all things energy.

Yet in light of the likewise decidedly negative state of $WTIC's momentum, at worst there are lower prices still ahead, and at best a basing process lasting some weeks and months could develop instead. Per the former possibility, go back exactly one year (June 2011) for a "you are here" perspective. Per the latter, refer to mid-May 2010.

Today's deployment of four U.S. minesweepers in the Persian Gulf could be paving the way for $WTIC to form a base. Likewise the Saudi card appears all the more on the table, as any war launched against Iran probably brings an Iranian response to the "kingdom." If not from Iran, then possibly Russia, as removing Saudi supply could secure the value of Russia's, which in current climes is vulnerable to marginalization at the altar of hyperinflationary breakdown. You gotta wonder, too. Did Putin talk "duck hunting" with Bibi today? In so many words tell him, "You touch Iran and the Middle East's imperial oil fiefdoms are turned into parking lots."


$SPX

So about today's muted volume: it is enough to expose deer frozen in the headlights of an oncoming freight train. Relative strength (top panel) and momentum (bottom), both in balance, appear to be turning over. Of course, given their repair this month, there could be time and space to hold the market up a bit, at least relatively speaking. Assume for the time being, then, a 2nd wave of five waves down from this year's peak will continue forming, with a downward leg of this 2nd wave currently unfolding. Other technical measures likewise repaired during this month's bounce also support this outlook.

Having done a yeoman's job disguising the market's ill internals (which condition has persisted for so long healthy observers likewise are being made sick!), a "sign of the times" in transition to panic might lead to the weakest of Elliott corrective waves forming here. Thus, a so-called "running correction" is depicted above forming the 2nd wave down from this year's peak.

Index levels last seen in the summer of 2009 still appear likely over weeks ahead. Some sectors could challenge their March '09 lows, however. Approaching is Team Fraud wielding the only weapon at its disposal not likely to be resisted (i.e. a tidal wave of sell orders), made to bolster its cause in battle with Glass-Steagall...


Fast Money
* * * * *

© The Risk Averse Alert — Advocating a patient, disciplined approach to stock market investing. Overriding objective is limiting financial risk. Minimizing investment capital loss is a priority.

Analysis centers on the stock market's path of least resistance. Long-term, this drives a simple strategy for safely investing a 401(k) for maximum profit. Intermediate-term, investing with stock index tracking-ETFs (both their long and short varieties) is advanced. Short-term, stock index options occasionally offer extraordinary profit opportunities when the stock market is moving along its projected path.

Nothing is set in stone. Nor is the stock market's path of least resistance always known. More often than not, there are no stock index option positions recommended.


There's an easy way to boost your investment discipline...

Get Real-Time Trade Notification!

Friday, June 22, 2012

KSA in the Cross Hairs


What is going on with crude oil? Is it something of a speedometer measuring a hyperinflationary breakdown's acceleration and deceleration (at least that which is being anticipated)?


$WTIC

Now, in breakdown strange things are happening. Supply and demand contract, yet the price on the best piece of collateral on the planet backing the trans-Atlantic banking system's mountain of debt increases, as it must lest the mountain be at even greater risk of collapse.

At present we have oil apparently falling of its own weight (relatively tame volume is suggesting this). So, with demand solidly on course to continue contracting, how in the world will supply be taken out faster?

Remember Libya last year? So far this year sanctions on Iran set to go into effect on July 1st aren't working. Saudi Arabia beware.


Fast Money
* * * * *

© The Risk Averse Alert — Advocating a patient, disciplined approach to stock market investing. Overriding objective is limiting financial risk. Minimizing investment capital loss is a priority.

Analysis centers on the stock market's path of least resistance. Long-term, this drives a simple strategy for safely investing a 401(k) for maximum profit. Intermediate-term, investing with stock index tracking-ETFs (both their long and short varieties) is advanced. Short-term, stock index options occasionally offer extraordinary profit opportunities when the stock market is moving along its projected path.

Nothing is set in stone. Nor is the stock market's path of least resistance always known. More often than not, there are no stock index option positions recommended.


There's an easy way to boost your investment discipline...

Get Real-Time Trade Notification!

Thursday, June 21, 2012

Fast and Furious Rhyme Time


Wha-wha-what happened? Are we freeing up capital to pick up some yummy Greek debt? Or, more likely, is time come to prepare for the EMU's burial? And what is criminal ratings agency Moody's up to? The timing of its credit downgrade of major trans-Atlantic banks today following on yesterday's "no hyperinflationary soup for you!" from the Fed Fuehrer hardly seems coincidental. Yet more transparency in a desperate bid to provoke crisis necessary to keep a ridiculous game of make believe going?

Whatever the cause of today's thumping, the developing attack on Team Fraud's cover at the top should not be overlooked. The U.S. House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, through its "Fast and Furious" investigation, has found cause to hold U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder in contempt of Congress, creating a constitutional crisis now poised to become the Obama administration's Watergate moment.

They say history never repeats itself, but often rhymes. Well, the formal start of the American hyperinflationary experience dates back to August 15, 1971. On that date President Nixon cancelled the Bretton Woods international monetary system and the dismantling of the U.S. physical economy — the greatest industrial powerhouse the world had ever seen — subsequently moved into high gear.




Mmmm. Yummy sophistry sandwich, Dick. Great job, too, putting down those "international money speculators." Lord knows these folks had nothing to do with the astronomical increase in U.S. Treasury debt issuance since...




A destructive policy pushed by a seditious (fascist) political element inevitably brought pushback from elements within the U.S. political establishment awakened to a threat that, today is right at our doorstep. In due course, then, circumstance conducive to Nixon's removal was played up and the President was forced to either resign or face impeachment.

Enter today's rhyme. At the very moment the American hyperinflationary experience is set to go Wiemar the President apparently has walked right into a trap that, even members of his own party appear prepared to spring shut. Therein lies a potentially distinguishing circumstance determining how soon March '09 lows are taken out (in "Beware the Approaching Terror" are weekly S&P 500 charts depicting two possibilities). Should Team Fraud's cover be blown with Obama's removal, then quite possibly "No more hyperinflationary soup for you!" could become a legislative imperative sinking today's mountain of garbage to the bottom of the sea in a panic dwarfing the most recent instance reinstatement of Glass-Steagall had traction in Congress.

One thing extraordinarily pertinent about that mountain of Treasury debt the lovers of s#!^ had better get through their thick skulls here at the dawn of collapse of the game of make believe its existence was made to support. The vast majority of Treasury debt was not created on account of runaway spending in Washington. (Good lord, you couldn't spend that much if you tried! Yet if you could, then how the heck did 9/11 happen?) Instead it exists at the behest of the Ponzi scheme that collapsed in 2008. It was created on its own account, this because in an environment where rates are falling it is considered a "no brainer" to issue debt like it were candy. In effect Adam Smith's Leveraged Ponzi Scheme (a.k.a. "structured finance") largely capitalized this debt. Thus is the greater portion of it best regarded illegitimate in the current environment, as no Ponzi scheme can continue forever (not to mention that, a Ponzi scheme is less than a zero-sum game and will by no means facilitate creation of wealth out of thin air, the likes of which would otherwise generate ample cash flows to service debt incurred while physically building "something out of nothing," such as American capitalism — not today's British imperial brand — has been demonstrated amply capable of achieving at defining moments over the past 2+ centuries). The bulk of U.S. Treasury debt either will be written off outright, or become intimately tied to a Third National Bank of the United States capitalized by massive, dedicated, long-term-oriented investment in productivity enhancing projects radically altering today's physical economy in a manner that similarly distinguishes it at present from the era when horses and buggies roamed the landscape. This might be a tough idea for today's glorified gamblers to wrap their Ivy League destroyed brains around, but you know what they say: necessity is the mother of invention. There is no getting around the fact that, if mankind is to prove itself sane, then reassertion of the American System of Political Economy — protectionism and all — is the inescapable direction we will be moving once today's game of make believe ends tragically, and that quite likely imminently.




Fast Money
* * * * *

© The Risk Averse Alert — Advocating a patient, disciplined approach to stock market investing. Overriding objective is limiting financial risk. Minimizing investment capital loss is a priority.

Analysis centers on the stock market's path of least resistance. Long-term, this drives a simple strategy for safely investing a 401(k) for maximum profit. Intermediate-term, investing with stock index tracking-ETFs (both their long and short varieties) is advanced. Short-term, stock index options occasionally offer extraordinary profit opportunities when the stock market is moving along its projected path.

Nothing is set in stone. Nor is the stock market's path of least resistance always known. More often than not, there are no stock index option positions recommended.


There's an easy way to boost your investment discipline...

Get Real-Time Trade Notification!

Wednesday, June 20, 2012

Bon appetit!


If the market isn't near a top from which it is likely to crater, then that top is very near...


NYSE McClellan

The second instance noted above when the NYSE McClellan Oscillator peaked in late-August last year is further highlighted for the simple fact the NYSE Summation Index then too had slipped into the negative only to be turned back up toward its 0-line, just as is occurring now. Weakness, though, setting up this present instance is rather more decided than that preceding last year's July-August throttling. The Summation Index's steady descent over the past 4+ months, going negative in May and remaining there still, projects very well my longstanding characterization. Overall the NYSE is trading garbage no one really wants.

And that is a big problem for weak hands who need much more than biblical quantities of liquidity to remain afloat, and this for much longer than forty days, as well. They need Glass-Steagall and a return to sovereign banking along with fixed exchange rates, this that the number of corporations whose bonds are AAA-rated would again require dozens of hands to count, rather than today's one (ridiculous!). In other words, what's missing is an immovable anchor cultivating financial stability and, itself, effectively regulating the conduct of investment banks. Real investment choice, where rock solid can be had in truth, rather than scammed by criminal ratings agencies still on the loose.

Those who are saying, "We cannot put the toothpaste back in the tube!" plainly are but types who actually enjoy eating s#!^... Bon appetit!


Fast Money
* * * * *

© The Risk Averse Alert — Advocating a patient, disciplined approach to stock market investing. Overriding objective is limiting financial risk. Minimizing investment capital loss is a priority.

Analysis centers on the stock market's path of least resistance. Long-term, this drives a simple strategy for safely investing a 401(k) for maximum profit. Intermediate-term, investing with stock index tracking-ETFs (both their long and short varieties) is advanced. Short-term, stock index options occasionally offer extraordinary profit opportunities when the stock market is moving along its projected path.

Nothing is set in stone. Nor is the stock market's path of least resistance always known. More often than not, there are no stock index option positions recommended.


There's an easy way to boost your investment discipline...

Get Real-Time Trade Notification!

Tuesday, June 19, 2012

Insolvency With No Credible Backstop


Listen, if you can put lipstick on bankrupt euro-PIIGS, you can dress up just about anything. The question now is what will it take to transform persistent, panic-stricken rumors of but more hyperinflationary happiness waiting in the wings into a liquidity deluge in fact. Never mind that central banks are trapped and know it. Were truth otherwise couldn't they just somehow quietly bail out JPM along with the European banking system? How is that a mountain of debt built up over the past forty years does not generate cash flows sufficient to sustain the burden? Just how much debt is insolvent? What does this mean to derivatives counter-parties who continue pretending the trans-Atlantic banking system's solvency is not in question?

Surely, without so much as asking these hard questions, plenty of representatives in Congress are contemplating the worst while desperate Dimon pretends a rising rate environment will be profitable to his firm. This is, of course, likely assuming counter-parties to JPM's huge derivatives book possess the wherewithal to make good on their obligations when confidence nearer the top of the capital structure takes a dirt nap. We saw how that went in 2008. And now, with Uncle Sam "all in" and still no sign of benevolent life on Mars willing to pony up and backstop lenders of last resort, chances are with the EMU's pending demise JP Morgan Chase will not fare nearly as well as it did in 2008.

Indeed, could JP Morgan Chase be the new AIG? Why else compel a lousy liar to appear before Congress twice in one week? Someone way at the top of the dream machine pumping fantasies about "liquidity traps" must be having a seizure. Throw in a Volcker aggressively arguing against Glass-Steagall (probably with a drone to his head) and you have a bonafide panic as plain as day, yet further repairing Wall Street's long lost transparency.

Fee junkies hooked on bailout may own many things that meet the eye, but none of these is any match to a bond market yielding squat while still more debt is joining the insolvency parade. The trouble with rumors of central bank intervention is that, more than ever, the promise cannot be met without dire consequence. Yet for intervention's downside — accelerated shutdown of the physical economy in particular — to be at all palatable likely will require dire circumstance, which in fact still appears right around the corner...


$CPC

Based on the current position of the CBOE Put/Call Ratio one Larry McMillan sees the S&P 500 one hundred points higher still. You might be inclined to agree with him were a static view taken supposing the market now is similarly poised as following last August's throttling. Chances are, though, you and Larry will be proven mistaken.

If only weakness leading us to this point were still centered on Greece — last year's problem euro-child. Barely were means available last year to deal with Greece's insolvency. Today, the euro-zone's insolvency has gotten much bigger and there isn't a backstop in place big enough to deal with this. Thus remains my view that, one hundred S&P 500 points in the other direction, again, and again, and again, is the far more likely outcome today's still elevated put/call ratio is signaling.




Fast Money
* * * * *

© The Risk Averse Alert — Advocating a patient, disciplined approach to stock market investing. Overriding objective is limiting financial risk. Minimizing investment capital loss is a priority.

Analysis centers on the stock market's path of least resistance. Long-term, this drives a simple strategy for safely investing a 401(k) for maximum profit. Intermediate-term, investing with stock index tracking-ETFs (both their long and short varieties) is advanced. Short-term, stock index options occasionally offer extraordinary profit opportunities when the stock market is moving along its projected path.

Nothing is set in stone. Nor is the stock market's path of least resistance always known. More often than not, there are no stock index option positions recommended.


There's an easy way to boost your investment discipline...

Get Real-Time Trade Notification!

Monday, June 18, 2012

Pimping Greek Debt and Other Nasty Garbage


You have to hand it to the Street for the manner in which it is quickly addressing the issue of transparency, this that confidence might be bolstered in the wares it pedals. Pity conviction being elevated with confidence, though, is the view that weak hands hopelessly bankrupt and trapped have never been more obviously desperate in search for a bid on garbage polluting their book...


What is Hans Hume smoking? Let's see, we have Spanish debt (an order of magnitude greater than Greece's outstanding debt) trading at record yields, Italian debt similarly quaking (another giant mountain of insolvency pressuring the bankrupt EMU), anti-troika-memorandum political parties winning 60% of the vote in yesterday's Greek parliamentary elections, as well as no progress yet convincing Germany their Wiemar experience wasn't so bad (so why not live it again!), and to think Greek debt trading at 13 cents is comparable to Russian debt in 1998! Good lord, if I could take a dump in the middle of this post and put it up for bid, assuredly there would be more future value in it than anything Greece is offering (if not as a collectors item come the trans-Atlantic banking system's collapse, then simply as garden compost, which quite likely presents more benefit than Greek debt offers even at today's steep "discount"). Yet since I cannot physically crap all over this post, the next best thing will have to do. Take it away Jeffrey Harte...
Being fair minded, Jeff's perspective on banks and financials obviously pimps the same fantasy as that dressed up by Hans Hume. There's really no point ridiculing the living dead, though. The money that talked to the Euro Stoxx Banks Index covered at the start of the above segment said it all. Yet those who animate the living dead, like Hume and Harte, well, Frank Zappa has these scammers covered...
Well we don't get excited when it crumbles and breaks We just get on the phone and call up some flakes —Team Fraud Mantra
The part about a toilet blowing up notwithstanding overpriced, worthless advice is metaphor for poetic justice about to ruin today's purveyors of fantasy. We will know how hopeless is Team Fraud's cause following this week's G-20 failure to bludgeon Merkel into hyperinflationary submission. Fast Money
* * * * *
© The Risk Averse Alert — Advocating a patient, disciplined approach to stock market investing. Overriding objective is limiting financial risk. Minimizing investment capital loss is a priority. Analysis centers on the stock market's path of least resistance. Long-term, this drives a simple strategy for safely investing a 401(k) for maximum profit. Intermediate-term, investing with stock index tracking-ETFs (both their long and short varieties) is advanced. Short-term, stock index options occasionally offer extraordinary profit opportunities when the stock market is moving along its projected path. Nothing is set in stone. Nor is the stock market's path of least resistance always known. More often than not, there are no stock index option positions recommended. There's an easy way to boost your investment discipline... Get Real-Time Trade Notification!

Friday, June 15, 2012

The Hitler Card


The technical picture following today's positive follow-through to unsubstantiated rumors of coordinated central bank intervention late yesterday confirms the essence of my conclusion of it. Namely that, what really has been gained is but "a few minutes more for trapped weak hands to offload a few more scraps of garbage." It appears today's quarterly witching helped the cause...


$NYA

The NYSE Composite Index's close above its 200-day moving average on increasing volume is a positive, no?

No. (But no doubt made to order for those hooked on fraud and hanging on for dear life, as appearances are everything when common knowledge is that, all is not what it seems. Even those who drool over incredibly low price-to-book on financials, like Karen Finerman, get it ... notwithstanding viewpoints straight out of fantasy land.)


$NYHL

That's a bearish divergence. If strong hands were behind today's bump in volume, then as the NYSE Composite Index advanced higher off its early-June bottom the above measure more surely would have expanded, rather than come up short of its best set last Wednesday.

As this bearish divergence is occurring while the market struggles higher (this very much along lines suspected a week ago), there is another ominous technical setup coinciding with today's lift higher off early-June bottom, raising likelihood the market is not about to receive any pleasant surprises out of Europe.


$CPC

The above indicated CBOE Put/Call Ratio divergence often coincides with market tops. For a better sense of what could lie in store with $CPC trending higher pretty much the entire year, while more or less printing above its 200-day moving average since May, just look back to this time last year. As you will plainly see contrasting this measure's recent momentum swings with those leading to last August's throttling (see MACD, bottom panel), a much bigger hurting could be in the works. Go figure.

Rumor has it Germany desires the euro's survival. Yet what has it done to mitigate the threat of Greece's chaotic exit from the EMU? Their silence in the face of Greek demands to renegotiate the troika "memorandum" currently accelerating Greece's collapse is curious. Why isn't this tack even being pushed by bailout junkies, let alone Germany?

News Flash! Germany wants Greece to leave the EMU. Why? Because Germany wants the EMU to collapse. Why? "Fool me once, shame on you" (WWI). "Fool me twice, shame on me" (WWII). If you think Russia is working overtime in Greece, just imagine the juicy slice of Russian energy supplies awaiting Germany following the EMU's demise!

Truth of the matter is many more centuries will need to pass before Hitler is forgotten, and such chaos leading to the likes but awaits a Wiemar redux. The odds of this occurring voluntarily are zero.

So, brace yourself for raw acts of violence venturing submission to a hyperinflationary imperial flop, itself poising to be but icing on a larger misery cake should a major conflagration — world war — be a fait accompli. Desperate times call for desperate measures, yet as such are harder to disguise. In truth this moment likewise presents historic opportunity to extend all the way to England the American Revolution. The world's most accomplished builder of financial anchors is proven in its short history. Glass-Steagall certainly could wield a lot of American punch in the thermonuclear age.


Fast Money
* * * * *

© The Risk Averse Alert — Advocating a patient, disciplined approach to stock market investing. Overriding objective is limiting financial risk. Minimizing investment capital loss is a priority.

Analysis centers on the stock market's path of least resistance. Long-term, this drives a simple strategy for safely investing a 401(k) for maximum profit. Intermediate-term, investing with stock index tracking-ETFs (both their long and short varieties) is advanced. Short-term, stock index options occasionally offer extraordinary profit opportunities when the stock market is moving along its projected path.

Nothing is set in stone. Nor is the stock market's path of least resistance always known. More often than not, there are no stock index option positions recommended.


There's an easy way to boost your investment discipline...

Get Real-Time Trade Notification!

Thursday, June 14, 2012

Hooked on Fraud


Unconfirmed "rumors" about coordinated central bank intervention dominating the trade late today likely means but one thing: NASA finally — finally! — discovered benevolent life on Mars willing to backstop the perpetual bailout of the trans-Atlantic banking system from now until the second coming of Jesus. Either that, or JP Morgan's book must be quaking badly. No doubt this rumor du jour is a perfect follow on yesterday's Senate Banking Committee shoulder massage attempting to relieve JPM's terrible stress from dodging sharks.

There was also a buzz surrounding extraordinary $SPY call option purchases today. No accompanying rumor of legislation requiring banks and financials to pay a tax-free dividend of at least 10%, so I will assume the call options belong to some desperate jerk at the Fed with nothing better to do than burn money to warm the hopelessly bankrupt economic albatrosses its utter lack of oversight created.

Washington has 72 hours to ram through Glass-Steagall, otherwise it appears hyperinflationary shutdown of energy production now likewise hitting food production (beef) will be moving into credit markets a la processes we have seen developing in Europe this week, whereby confidence in a dung pile made larger is irrevocably shattered, forcing interest rates higher and resulting in but further shutdown of the physical economy.

For now, though, with the EMU still intact we can pretend rumors of coordinated action from insolvent central banks means something other than a transparent fraud buying a few minutes more for trapped weak hands to offload a few more scraps of garbage.


Fast Money
* * * * *

© The Risk Averse Alert — Advocating a patient, disciplined approach to stock market investing. Overriding objective is limiting financial risk. Minimizing investment capital loss is a priority.

Analysis centers on the stock market's path of least resistance. Long-term, this drives a simple strategy for safely investing a 401(k) for maximum profit. Intermediate-term, investing with stock index tracking-ETFs (both their long and short varieties) is advanced. Short-term, stock index options occasionally offer extraordinary profit opportunities when the stock market is moving along its projected path.

Nothing is set in stone. Nor is the stock market's path of least resistance always known. More often than not, there are no stock index option positions recommended.


There's an easy way to boost your investment discipline...

Get Real-Time Trade Notification!

Wednesday, June 13, 2012

Same Pig, New Lipstick


Should Congress be focusing on the "fiscal cliff" rather than big daddy of a massive Derivatives Black Hole sinking the trans-Atlantic banking system, JP Morgan?

Hardly. However, today's extraordinarily transparent conference call held before the Senate Banking Committee, attempting to stop the bleeding at JPM simply will not do. New lipstick applied in a hearing turned hedge is a pig venturing to stave off sharks circling a crippled whale. But two weeks time risk truth of whether JPM's 2nd quarter will be profitable, as Mr. Dimon projects. Two weeks is a long time when $125 billion cannot buy love in Spain.

"No one on earth thinks JPM will fail," this according to Rob Cox of Reuters today. Right, and no one saw the sub-prime crisis coming, according to Dimon at the depths of the '08 crisis. The more things change, the more they stay the same.




Once again, it cannot be said enough: Team Fraud is trapped. A rising rate environment is the death knell of the trans-Atlantic banking system. The name "Volcker" soon could be used less frequently in conjunction with some "rule," and more in comparison to rates when he was Fed chairman back in the early 1980s. This time, however, the hyperinflationary backdrop will pale in comparison.

Returning to Doug Noland's "Pavlovian," the fundamental backdrop we can expect will accompany this anticipated rising rate environment (already hitting Europe) is forecast by this read of history...
In studying past monetary fiascos, I've often been struck by the predictable nature of Credit inflations. Credit booms would be followed by busts – and the arduous downside of the Credit cycle would invariably provoke aggressive policy responses. Historically, governments would resort to printing larger amounts of currency (or simply incorporate more zeros), in increasingly desperate attempts to support post-Bubble faltering economic output, rising unemployment and sinking prices levels (goods and asset prices).

Often it would come down to a critical dynamic: Policymakers would eventually recognize (admit) that their money printing operations were having deleterious effects. A consensus view would even develop that inflationary policies had to be wound down – if not scuttled altogether. Throughout history, there have been many derivations of the typical pronouncement, “Be on notice, this will be the last time this government resorts to the printing press.” And rarely would it ever work out that way. Indeed, not only would monetary inflations continue, the scope of the money printing would too often escalate to the point of being completely out of control. Once unleashed, monetary inflations take on a life of their own – and turn unwieldy on many levels. And this complex dynamic explains why monetary history is littered with worthless currencies.

Some "Rare Earth," indeed...





Fast Money
* * * * *

© The Risk Averse Alert — Advocating a patient, disciplined approach to stock market investing. Overriding objective is limiting financial risk. Minimizing investment capital loss is a priority.

Analysis centers on the stock market's path of least resistance. Long-term, this drives a simple strategy for safely investing a 401(k) for maximum profit. Intermediate-term, investing with stock index tracking-ETFs (both their long and short varieties) is advanced. Short-term, stock index options occasionally offer extraordinary profit opportunities when the stock market is moving along its projected path.

Nothing is set in stone. Nor is the stock market's path of least resistance always known. More often than not, there are no stock index option positions recommended.


There's an easy way to boost your investment discipline...

Get Real-Time Trade Notification!

Tuesday, June 12, 2012

1907 Bank Panic, 2012 Style


Anyone wanna bet that, for every scare tactic being applied to Greece, representatives of the Russian and/or Chinese governments are working behind the scenes to counter the implied threat? Are you kidding? Just imagine how quickly imperialist intrigues in both Iran and Syria — these inspired by a collapsing financial system and venturing to engulf the entire Asian continent in war — indeed, might rather quickly dissipate once the euro-zone disintegrates and brings down the West's major banks (including, most emphatically, those in the United States). It's probably a safe bet, too, that Russia and China perceive far more opportunity than just peace in the region were the EMU to collapse and bring social chaos to the front door of Team Fraud's captive states.

So, threats to Greece's food supply, its energy supply, its credit, make for a Depends moment in the face of very significant players today being threatened in other dangerous ways, whose present interest now probably rests in the euro-zone's demise. Oh, those Ivy League strategists — the children of Oxford — they're the best! A taco short of a combo platter always makes for a great laugh. Rest assured, we will never hear anything about this. Yet a Russian and Chinese education of up and coming Greeks on the geopolitical situation in truth (as opposed to the "so hysterical, it's downright funny" of trapped, bankrupt swindlers, some of whom are so in tune with Nazi ways, they've earned the name) is a matter likely occurring this very moment.

Per but the financial aspect of the EMU's pending demise consider the 1907 Bankers' Panic a prospective template, with many matters rhyming today. Always knowing that, at some point this moment would arrive, even one step back in a more vicious repeat of the 1907 experience might find Team Fraud preparing two steps forward to a global banking union, topping its previous accomplishment which led to creation of the Federal Reserve System. Something to think about, no matter how funny today's bumbling pawns.


$NYAD

The verdict is in. The two best trading days of the year — these occurring over the past month — and zero follow-through. Well poised, too, it appears (see bottom panel), for a return of weakness, this while $NYA still trades below its 200-day moving average.

Indeed, all things technical continue supporting a very negative, near-term outlook. A rapid trip back to index levels last seen in the summer of '09 remains highly probable over days and weeks ahead.


Fast Money
* * * * *

© The Risk Averse Alert — Advocating a patient, disciplined approach to stock market investing. Overriding objective is limiting financial risk. Minimizing investment capital loss is a priority.

Analysis centers on the stock market's path of least resistance. Long-term, this drives a simple strategy for safely investing a 401(k) for maximum profit. Intermediate-term, investing with stock index tracking-ETFs (both their long and short varieties) is advanced. Short-term, stock index options occasionally offer extraordinary profit opportunities when the stock market is moving along its projected path.

Nothing is set in stone. Nor is the stock market's path of least resistance always known. More often than not, there are no stock index option positions recommended.


There's an easy way to boost your investment discipline...

Get Real-Time Trade Notification!

Monday, June 11, 2012

Planet Hopium


I told you Depends would come in handy! Hope placed on European fiscal integration and the new fantasy involving a "banking union" might as well include plans to legalize heroin, if only to mitigate the excruciating pain a fascist financial dictatorship naturally entails. There is but little time remaining to play make believe, what with a heightened measure of want on both sides of the Atlantic making for a powder keg about to explode in Greece, as well as all across the euro-zone periphery (notwithstanding the many Alan Schwartz clones claiming otherwise).

Any effort to but further marginalize at the alter of unpayable debt the growing population of financial fraud victims is doomed in the present climate. No doubt, this reality is setting in, yet its consequence continues to escape general perception.

Unless significant debt restructuring / write down and systemic reorganization repairing the utter lack of transparency crushing investor confidence becomes the order of the day — this raising to a deafening volume the call for a global Glass-Steagall standard — it is o-v-e-r for those presently trapped in the current fraud-rife financial paradigm here at the brink of its collapse. Those like Citigroup's Tobias Levkovich who would cite the fact that, certain systemically important credit spreads have yet to blow out a la 2008, pre-Lehman Brothers' collapse, hold tight to fantasy's last bastion of faith in the capacity of lenders of last resort to withstand an imploding mountain of debt. Presumably lender of last resort activism over the past few years keeps spreads presently in check — an effect blind faith assumes immutable. Yet does anyone wonder if systemically vital credit spreads are tame out of utter necessity?(!) Lord knows no shortage of extraordinary manipulations are keeping up appearances on many fronts. Truth is, though, there's no point in blowing out credit spreads when there are no more lenders of last resort which to easily swindle, quite unlike the situation in 2008. That former iteration served to buy time. As was inevitable, time has expired.

The funny men of Wall Street who make their way to mainstream media outlets with outlandish comparisons to previous, post-WWII periods act only to keep many an unsophisticated operator frozen like deer in the headlights of an oncoming freight train. It is so plain I am inclined to take back remarks above about a lack of transparency on Wall Street.

Need I say more? Better change my Depends, as Charles Dallara and every other lame apologist for a fraud-rife banking system are laying on the fright pretty thick per the likely prospect Greece bolts from the EMU. He says ATMs possibly could no longer work if Greece leaves. The only problem with this prospect is the likelihood that, 90% of all Greeks probably have drained their bank accounts already. So ATMs no longer working rather might be a blessing in disguise, cutting down on crime committed against those still possessing capacity to use them. But way to accelerate European bank runs, Chuck! You know what I would say if I were Donald Trump...


Fast Money
* * * * *

© The Risk Averse Alert — Advocating a patient, disciplined approach to stock market investing. Overriding objective is limiting financial risk. Minimizing investment capital loss is a priority.

Analysis centers on the stock market's path of least resistance. Long-term, this drives a simple strategy for safely investing a 401(k) for maximum profit. Intermediate-term, investing with stock index tracking-ETFs (both their long and short varieties) is advanced. Short-term, stock index options occasionally offer extraordinary profit opportunities when the stock market is moving along its projected path.

Nothing is set in stone. Nor is the stock market's path of least resistance always known. More often than not, there are no stock index option positions recommended.


There's an easy way to boost your investment discipline...

Get Real-Time Trade Notification!