Will We Hold It Wednesday – S&P 2,000 Edition
by phil - August 27th, 2014 8:09 am
2,000.02 – We did it!!!
Unfortunately, we can't afford to pop the champagne because the 0.03 we spend on it would put us back under – so we'll watch and we'll wait another day before celebrating a milestone we've been expecting since last week (see "Will Jackson Hole Give Us S&P 2,000?") and we went with that TNA trade we discussed in yesterday's post to cover the expected bull run.
We also picked up long plays on BAC and DBA in our Live Member Chat Room and BAC has already rocketed on the settlement news but DBA is only just making the turn and still makes an excellent play that we'll be adding to our Buy List (Members Only) along with 10 more picks we'll be making this week.
As you can see from Dave Fry's SPY chart, we have set a new record for this decade for low volume on a full market day. Last Christmas Eve was 43M on a half day, for example, but the Christmas Eve before that was 53M and those were the lowest two days I could find before I got bored looking (very scientific).
Anyway, the point is that 38.9M is VERY LOW VOLUME – so low that paying attention to a dot on a chart that is drawn in such a light touch is just silly. That makes yesterday's jaunt over 2,000 completely meaningless and more so with the additional evidence of the intraday action which, as Dave notes, could not have been more manipulated.
This is why we have been pressing our bear bets. Even though we have peace in Gaza and peace in Ukraine (for today) and even though we've forgotten about Europe's negative GDP and China's plunging property prices and Ebola – we still couldn't find more than 38.9M buyers for SPY – that's just sad!
Speaking of China, last Monday, for FREE, right in the morning post, we picked the following on FXI:
We shorted India last week (EPI) and now FXI has got my mouth
Covert Operations
by ilene - August 31st, 2010 1:33 am
Covert Operations
The billionaire brothers who are waging a war against Obama.
Excerpts:
DiZerega, who has lost touch with Charles [Koch], eventually abandoned right-wing views, and became a political-science professor. He credits Charles with opening his mind to political philosophy, which set him on the path to academia; Charles is one of three people to whom he dedicated his first book. But diZerega believes that the Koch brothers have followed a wayward intellectual trajectory, transferring their father’s paranoia about Soviet Communism to a distrust of the U.S. government, and seeing its expansion, beginning with the New Deal, as a tyrannical threat to freedom. In an essay, posted on Beliefnet, diZerega writes, “As state socialism failed . . . the target for many within these organizations shifted to any kind of regulation at all. ‘Socialism’ kept being defined downwards.”
Members of the John Birch Society developed an interest in a school of Austrian economists who promoted free-market ideals. Charles and David Koch were particularly influenced by the work of Friedrich von Hayek, the author of “The Road to Serfdom” (1944), which argued that centralized government planning led, inexorably, to totalitarianism. Hayek’s belief in unfettered capitalism has proved inspirational to many conservatives, and to anti-Soviet dissidents; lately, Tea Party supporters have championed his work. In June, the talk-radio host Glenn Beck, who has supported the Tea Party rebellion, promoted “The Road to Serfdom” on his show; the paperback soon became a No. 1 best-seller on Amazon. (Beck appears to be a fan of the Kochs; in the midst of a recent on-air parody of Al Gore, Beck said, without explanation, “I want to thank Charles Koch for this information.” Beck declined to elaborate on the relationship.)
[...]
As their fortunes grew, Charles and David Koch became the primary underwriters of hard-line libertarian politics in America. Charles’s goal, as Doherty described it, was to tear the government “out at the root.” The brothers’ first major public step came in 1979, when Charles persuaded David, then thirty-nine, to run for public office. They had become supporters of the Libertarian Party, and were backing its Presidential candidate, Ed Clark, who was running against Ronald Reagan from the right. Frustrated by the legal limits on campaign donations, they contrived to place David on the ticket, in the Vice-Presidential slot; upon becoming a candidate, he could lavish…