Thursday, August 7

Also closed aud short because the us dollar looks like it may be forming a top.

Looks like another lazy summer day, not much going on in the markets even with the geopolitcal issues bubbling all around.

Not yet, waiting for it to get bit warmer before heading anyplace south of here. Right now the weather is perfect in Paraguay, so we probably won't get moving until October at the earliest. We still haven't entirely nixed Argentina for the summer yet, it will depend what happens between now and then.

Stopped out of SPX long. Paper cut but still annoying because it reversed off my number.

Once again, the VIX calls were up 8x the increase in the VIX. Still lots of downside nervousness.

Unfortunately, I rarely log in to BBT these days, but I do read over it each day and caught Silverymoon spank this one outta the park!

"Quote Originally Posted by EnglishBulldog View Post
Here's some free red meat for Tex and the trend-lovers: with all the geopolitical stuff that's happening, you might think that gold would be even stronger and equities would be weaker than they are.
Yes, this occurred to me too. The geopolitical stuff at the moment doesn't amount to much, market wise. The palestinians have been getting annihilated for 60 years but the market will only worry if it looks like a trigger for instability in the Gulf, which it normally isn't. The Russia-NATO thing is just bluster so far, although the trade sanctions are a small negative for SPX. I think gold is just pricing in the possibility that Obama is even dumber than he looks and gets into some kind of real conflict with Russia. It seems far fetched in the sense that it would require a staggering degree of stupidity, but the history of conflict is filled with examples of that from "leaders", so maybe gold has to go up just a little to price that possibility in. Meanwhile pretty much everything else seems to be deflating.

Regarding the debate the other day between Tex and Bug about Russia: the thing is, any economic fallout from the sanctions will be a very minor hardship for Russians, compared to what they have endured in living memory. There is no way that will make them budge an inch. But the pampered West OTOH, with no serious hardship after WWII and hollowed out "economies" based mainly on buying other people's stuff with hallucinatory paper wealth, is much more sensitive to economic pain, not to mention all of Europe and the US are already in deep debt distress. The BRICs still take the US seriously in the sense that they are not going to send people to Canada and start fomenting upheaval on the US border, just like a sane person isn't going to walk up to a polar bear and start poking it with a walking stick. But beyond that, they have a harder and harder time taking US bluster seriously, something that even the dimwits in Washington seem to have noticed (and they are getting mad about it, leading to even poorer judgement). If their judgement was any good they wouldn't have started poking the Russian bear with a walking stick, but alas..."