[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sEDw9xgSmSc 450 300]

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I’ve found a bipartisan effort I invite you all to get behind.  Yes, that was me, invoking the word “bi-partisan.”   Harken quickly and not so lightly, as this will surely be a rare occurence not often repeated.

What I’m talking about is Representative Jeff Flake’s idea to “Staple Green Cards to PhD diplomas” so as to make sure we don’t cede any of that freshly minted U.S.-educated talent back to the Third World and worse (in the case of the Red Chinese).   Even President 0’Bama has gotten behind the idea, despite his telling Steve Jobs that he couldn’t sever the Gordian Knot of immigration reform gumming up the Congress.

And why not, I ask you?  Post-secondary education is one of Americas remaining differentiating advantages, and smart children from the world around come here to take advantage of it.  Why shouldn’t we make it easier for those bright individuals to enhance our quality of life here, not to mention add to the employment ranks by creating new businesses and hiring even more people?  Did you know that half of Silicon Valley start-ups over the last two decades have been started by foreign born individuals?

Howabout this — we wouldn’t even have Steve Jobs were his Dad not here on a student visa.  Serendipitous, no?

Maybe we should take the cue?

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Well that dollar bounced severely today, and so did my Skiffles, which are my one remaining hedge.  They weren’t enough to make up for the blood on the ground from my newly minted mining additions, but I’m not even yet half invested, so I’ve got a lot of room and a lot of dry powder…

And a lot of patience.

I will be adding to my Skiffles tomorrow, however, if the dollar continues it’s climb.  Gold is holding up strong here, and so is silver, which bodes well for the miners.  If this were a real commodity sell off, silver would’ve been bludgeoned far worse today.   BAA is a quarter shorter than yesterday and I might add to my holdings there in the morning, as I really liked the way it looked like it was being accumulated at the end of the day.

If you want to play with more generic pieces, keep GDX (large cap gold), GDXJ (junior gold) and SIL (silver miners) in mind to play the ETF field.  For the more adventurous, like m’self, I also like NUGT on a pullback here as well as AGQ.  RGLD, last of all, is showing nice relative strength.

See you tomorrow, I hope.

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I’m going to be out an about quite a bit this coming week and not even back in the office until Wednesday.  I’m sorry, I can’t help it if much of the Free World is determined to secure my services in the the final months of 2011 (it’s beginning to give me the willies, actually), but there it is.  People are agitated.  I– to put it clinically–  am an Expediter.  I specialize in expediting Agitations.

And there it is.

Luckily for you, the tenor of my argument hasn’t changed much, despite the rollicking good time the market gave us for OpEx.   Isn’t it odd how during bearish-leaning periods, we get bullish OpEx days, and then the exact opposite during bullish leaning periods?  Maybe I’m being overly anecdotal, like Jay Nordlinger on especially strong tea.    This is the feeling I’m getting in my gut, however, and its a feeling that shouldn’t be ignored.

Why?  Because I got the same feeling around this time in 2007, just before the SHTF… or to be more concise, just before the SHTF in slow motion for about a year, crescendoing at year end of 2008.

I’m getting that itchy feeling again.  And here’s the deal, the dollar could be, or could not be confirming that feeling.  How’s that for precision, eh?   Well when you look at my daily dollar chart, you’ll understand the provenance of my thinking:

See how oversold we are on the dollar at this point?  We really should bounce at that $76 line, maybe after a day or two.   It makes all the sense in the world.   But then there’s the fact that we’ve busted through the 200-day EMA, and in an almost “broken parabola” fashion.  It wouldn’t shock me to see us test the lows given the sharpness of that decline.

It doesn’t make much sense to me… the EURO should be crashing, not the dollar.  But who knows what’s really happening.  For all we know Bernanke is running the presses to wallpaper Angela Merkel’s boudoir even as Europe talks about QE3’ing their own combined fiat experiment.   Much is misdirection in the global race to devalue one’s currency, and I wouldn’t trust one of these spotted badgers as far as I could smell them.

So let’s not play the “speculation” game, but rather the “observation” one.  Let’s see if we get that expected bounce off $76 and let’s see if it lasts.   If it looks like the dollar will rise again, I will likely get out of what little I’ve left on the PM side, except for some very thin core positions, and I might even dabble in the opposite of QLD, our old friend QID, and of course, Mr. Skiffles.

But for now, the dollar still plummets, so let’s be nimble and continue to gather that grain for the winter.  Soon it will be time to sell grain, however, as there will be many hungry locusts knocking at the door.

Best to you all, I will try to check in on you as best I can.

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Loopy misguided hippies aside, you know it’s a crazy world out there, when even the closest brother quarrels to the death with his brother, Cain and Abel-style.  Soon enough, there will be dogs living with cats, and hippies trampled into dust by Mayor Bloomberg’s horsemen.  All around us will reign confusion and despair.

Luckily, there are still some things we can rely on.  The return of parachute pants within the next three years, Kim Kardashian’s made for TV divorce, a Texas win in the World Series … and Skiffles (SFK)  on the bounce.  Lookee here, son:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Note that we’ve already started seeing bank numbers from Schittybank, JP Morgue and Wells Fargoff— numbers that are less than picturesque… did you believe you’d see otherwise?   Did you also believe that this present imbroglio in Europe was going to end with a happy landing, with no brimstone-reeking dragons pulled out from beneath the four poster beds?  Do you really believe those patchouli hatted white rastafarians were going to leave Zuchinni Park without at least one projectile defenistration from the 55th floor of 85 Broad?

Think again, my brethren (and sistren).   It’s highly unlikely that the banks will be allowed to proceed from the Bastille any time soon, and if they do, it will likely be only for the purposes of lightening that awful burden upon their shoulders.

And so be it.   Know that the one thing you can rely on in the upcoming months, is that Skiffles will be with you, bouncing in its above-apportioned range, looking to shower you with profits.  Ladies and gentlemen, bring home a box of Skiffles today.

Best to you all.

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[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7WZ33w3B8Hw&feature=related 450 300]

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I hope you took Frankie’s advice last night.  When I went to bed last evening (I had an exhausting day), there were enough people wandering the iBankCoin desert wearing hairshirts and declaring the coming of Armegeddon that I thought I’d wandered into a particularly ascetic strain of the Stinkify Wall Street protest movement. 

But I put my faith in the machinations of the Great Machine — The PPT, more than I do the easily beclouded emotions of my fellow piker traders.  You see the Great Machine runs on blood of cold nanobytes and young trader stem cells.  It cares not for your fears and your worries any more than it feels like patting you on the back in your more elated or expansive periods. 

It feels nothing but the data.  And what’s curious about yesterday’s readings was not that we came off over “overbought” levels, but that The PPT “leveled off” at a certain point yesterday, and held fast over a period of increasing trader nervousness here and across the internets.   It certainly gained my attention.  Were you watching?

And that fastness in the mind of the Machine was telling us something.  Just as Timmah and his group of Eterno-Bears were rubbing their fat little paws together in anticipation of a plump pic-a-nic basket, the titanium hand of The PPT was wheeling back to strike a sharp blow to their tender snouts.  

Not so fast, little Bears… did you think it was really going to be this easy?

And truthfully, if we look at our long term signals, there’s not a lot indicating much of a correction in store.   For example, you think the Big Boys maybe had an idea about what GOOG was going to do?   Have a look at the $NDX weekly for a clue… It’s launched this week off both up-turning primary EMA’s, the 13 and the 34 week exponential moving averages.  It’s also got a lot of room to go on teh RSI and slow stochastics before it’s overbought. 

When the techs are that lively, it’s often a sign that the bull is not done goring his fat brother bear.   Perhaps this weekend I will extrapolate, if you so desire.

In the meantime, I still hold one last third of my QLD position, which I may have been too hasty to sell (but I had a plan to sell at $86, and one must stick to one’s plan, no?).  I also still hold a  small postition in SKF, which I will hold to as a hedge, through the rest of this roller coaster ride.

I also kept all my gold and silver positions, as they showed similar resiliance — that stickiness — that The PPT showed yesterday.   Also PPT related, the silver ETF went “oversold” ridiculously early yesterday.  That often portends a shallowness in the market that will soon be reversed.

Pay attention to sentiment, folks, but above all consult The Machine in these bear-colored times.   It will guide your hand and let you sleep at night.

Best to you all.

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Not Ready for the Rubber Match, Obviously

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The good news is that we should get a really nice bounce here in the next couple of days, and perhaps as early as tomorrow morning. The bad news is that I think we’ll very likely drop another 50 points on the S&P, and may drop as much as 90-150 before we get that rebound.

Here’s what I’m looking for on the $SPX — the only index that really matters here, although one could make a case for shorting the Cubes (QQQ) tomorrow morning as well, as it has yet to drop like it’s brethren.  I think that it’s very likely we get a quick broken elevator tomorrow to 1050, minimum.   If momentum really picks up, it might even drop as much as 90 to the second (red) line here:

 

 

And yes, even 950 is a possibility here, if the momentum gets all ragey to the point of the Friday employment numbers.  I really don’t expect that however, as we are egregiously oversold here.   I will be loosing my SKF, TZA and ERY to the trade winds as we visit these levels.  I may keep a base of the Skiffles, however.

Another reason I see the downspike continuing is that the dollar doesn’t seem to be done here, after busting through that resistance at $79 on the index.   I think the next target is the 50% retracement here:

 

Important to realize here, on this dollar index, however, is that price is finally through the 200 week EMA again, and we have the 13-week EMA finally crossing back over the 34-week EMA, with both on the upswing.   This is not good news for either the market or our precious metal friends, girls and boys.

Get your helmet.  Get two helmets and sit on one.   Protects against land mines.

Best to you, and take good care.

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I am sorry if you were unceremoniously dipped in pineapple sauce and then stuffed into the cherry smoker today, ending up braised to a fine turn.

It’s not like I didn’t give you ample warning.  In fact, that warning was even more ample today in The PPT, where I announced I was adding to my growing stacks of SKF, TZA and ERY certificates. 

Those certificates, and their already in-place comrades, yielded substantial gains for me and mine this day.  And I’m pretty sure they are not done, as of yet.   In fact, given some of the panicked calls I received from friends today, I think tomorrow should be a pretty interesting open. 

If you haven’t gone short anything, it’s probably a little late to start right now.  I’ll have more on that with some charts tonight.  In the meantime, enjoy this Indian Summer we are having in God’s Country, and try not to get too upset about the wayward state of the economy.

Help is on the way.  My best to you.

Addenda:  as it seems Le Monsieur has grown tired of most of you over at his site.  Please let the man rest.  In the meantime, do feel free to vent your concerns and comments on my fora. 

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