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From the monthly archives:
January 2012
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In today’s gold tout, I mentioned the possibility of looking for camouflage near current levels to get long. To give you an idea about the subtlety of the patterns to look for, I have reproduced a 1-minute chart of March Silver. There’s not much to grab hold of here — but that’s the point: The subtler the entry signals we can find, the more likely the trades are to work. In this case, however, as you can see, the trade did not work, since anyone who bought at X didn’t reach p for some obligatory partial profit-taking. Post-mortem note: When a bullish pattern this subtle and promising fails to deliver, take it as a sign that the futures may want to go lower, not higher. Whatever the case, on this particular evening, the futures are acting particularly squirrelly. Want to learn how to find these entry spots yourself? Click here for information about the upcoming Hidden Pivot Webinar.
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I’ll have more to say in Wednesday’s commentary concerning managing the risk of our trades in Comex Gold, but suffice it to say, it was not my intention to weather a $20 swing against us on two contracts after getting within less than 1.00 of the price where we’d intended to exit one of them.
We booked a paper gain of a little more than $1000 on the trade, leaving me more eager than ever to climb back aboard. If and when we do, if you’d like to be notified in real time of the opportunity, stay tuned Rick’s Picks intraday alerts. You can sign up for them by clicking the “Send me each item” box on your Account page. If you don’t subscribe but would like to try this service, receive a free week’s trial subscription by clicking here.
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Stocks and bullion have noticeably decoupled recently, but only mildly, and the effect so far is not strong enough to allow them to go their separate ways. Gold was up moderately early Sunday evening, but with DaBoyz manipulating index futures lower — now by nearly 8 points in the E-Mini S&Ps — gold and silver have given up their modest gains and are trading nearly unchanged.
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Europe’s Banks Afloat on Dwindling Credibility
by Rick Ackerman on January 31, 2012 12:01 am GMT · 74 comments
Sometimes it’s impossible to tell whether the financiers and politicians who carry water for the central banks are bad liars or just clueless dolts. A bureaucrat from the U.K. surfaced in the Wall Street Journal over the weekend, exhaling what seemed to us an ostentatious sigh of relief over the supposed success of the European Central Bank’s latest loan program: “[It provides] a very significant degree of breathing space to banks.” Yeah, sure. A very significant degree — as though the banking system’s terminally decaying colossus were not in danger of imploding tomorrow — and for no greater reason, possibly, than that some hapless bank clerk erroneously misplaced a decimal point.
The bureaucrat’s remark appeared, with unintended irony, in a story about how European banks are in a quandary over how to redeploy a torrent of digital cash that has recently come their way from the ECB’s magical credit-infindibulator. Recall that the banks sucked up €489 billion ($641 billion) in a matter of weeks after the ECB made that sum available to them in December for three years on super-easy terms. But what to do with it all? None of them are in the mood to lend to – heaven forbid! — businesses, and that leaves only two bad alternatives: using the digital money to buy government bonds from the » Read the full article