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.
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.
A Hidden Pivot at 1534.30 flagged here earlier is pulling the futures lower, along with a secondary target (shown) at 1532.70. Camouflage is called for if bottom-fishing, so start looking for the turn on the 5-minute (or less) chart from 1535.80 on down. If these supports give way easily and, heaven forbid, the futures close below them, the next stop would likely be 1500.00, the ‘D’ target of the large pattern shown. Night owls could also use a 1520.30 target to bottom-fish — without camouflage. A four-tick stop-loss should suffice. Want to learn how to do this stuff yourself? Click here for information about the upcoming Hidden Pivot Webinar on June 6-7.
There are numerous bearish patterns we can use to project a potentially important low, but the one that I like most has three single-bar coordinates, all sharply etched. They produce a 358.38 ‘D’ target, and although I cannot guarantee that will be where the carnage ends, it would most surely be worth bottom-fishing with a tight stop-loss. My best-case scenario implies that the low was made yesterday at 390.63, just 0.59 points from the ‘D’ target shown in lavender. To take the offensive, bulls would need to push this vehicle to 422.47 by Thursday.
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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