Current $Gold charts

There are some interesting trendline interactions, but no nodes are close by..
I would think the larger pattern is still down....

$SPX charts

Notice the trendline crossover about to happen on the top spreadsheet chart, and the .500 node getting close on the bottom spreadsheet chart... Breadth indicators (shown at very top) lead me to think we have more downside yet, so I vote with the node over the crossover..see earlier posts for dates..

The centre cannot hold.

I'm reminded of Yeat's famous poem here.

There is talk of bailouts for homeowners who can't make their mortgage payments. The question is never asked why, after a while, anyone would continue to pay mortgage payments if a few could simply claim 'hardship', to get out of them. After a while, as the economy worsens, it will be hard to find anyone who will keep up with their mortgage, and then credit card payments and some taxes will be ignored. Then the Banks and perhaps some levels of Government will find out what it means when their requests for payments become 'discretionary'. Even without the moral hazard of a Federal Bailout, if people have to choose between food and taxes, or food and their house payment, guess which goes?

Rental properties could also suffer, as renters lose jobs, are evicted, and dispossessed homeowners can't fill the appearing vacancies because their credit score is now so bad. At job losses approaching 1 million a month, 18 months of this could bring this about. Current national rental vacancies are about 10%, highest since before the 1960's.

So many apartment complexes could go bankrupt as well, and no bank will want to pick up these properties because they are no longer profitable. Who will the remaining renters pay their rent to? O.K., the banks, but it could be a loser for them. I don't know. And I suppose quite a few people will be living in their cars. Local city governments will also lose tax revenue from failures in the rental market, just like the loss in property taxes from dispossessed homeowners.

I won't even mention the lost tax revenues from failed commercial properties as 50+ retail chains have disappeared.

So where will all the money come from to maintain the local roads and water supplies, and police and fire protection, if local tax revenues fall hard? If most of the banks fail as well, as people 'forget' to make payments to them,the velocity of money will approach zero.

This could be when we'll all find out, what systemic collapse feels like.

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Yeats, 1920

$NYSI2 chart

If I had to guess, I'd say a bottom looks likely in early April, wouldn't you?
This matches well with the .5000 node on $SPX...See the earlier posts on this...

latest $NDX charts...

Notice that $NDX is also approaching a .5000 node, but it is further out. Right now I lean towards the $SPX charts being a better indicator of a proximate bottom. The .5000 node on the middle $NDX chart is at around 5/26/09...Note that there are major crossovers forming (both primary and second order)on the upper chart(1.382) that will come in around 4/1/09, and that may be significant as it's in the range we see for the .500 $SPX node at 4/7/09...

$SPX charts...

I haven't updated the $SPX charts as much as the $NDX charts, the banking component collapsed this index below it's trendlines, making the charts less useful, but now you can see we are approaching a .5000 node anyway... That node is formally arriving around 4/7/09, but my vote is for just before that, mid March at earliest.
But keep the formal date in mind in case it takes that long for a bottom....

Note the crossover on the 1.382 charts, it occurs on 3/19/09, very close to the 1.000 node date for USO. That may also signal the bottom as it is acceptably close to the $SPX .5000 node at that point (.487). Remember from our Fibonacci work on an earlier posting today, we get 602 and 620 as probable bottom price targets. Looking at the 1.272 $SPX chart above, you should be able to visualise where that price and time window is...

Gold charts...

Notice that the second order trendlines stopped the $Gold rally when the primary trendlines didn't...that's unusual...
This somewhat resurrects the idea that we still have a bottom in $Gold out somewhere near the .500 node or beyond, which is normal behaviour...note though that we are also sitting on a primary trendline, and this will provide support, so this is still a somewhat undecided set of charts that needs further time to resolve...

Elliot count on $SPX...

You can see here, we might be completing wave 3 of 5, and possibly starting a small wave 4 of 5, then you have the last real shorting opportunity as we do wave 5 of 5, and that's it for the big wave 'A' downleg from October 2007. A substantial wave 'B' should follow. It's possible that the turn date for USO, below, is related to the start of wave 'B' in stocks. It wouldn't be totally surprising if the end of 'A' and the beginning of 'B' for the $SPX was in mid to late March. Keep in mind that where I put the 'B' wave on the chart is not where it will end up. It will probably take several months to complete 'B', somewhere off the chart. This is only a schematic.

Just for completeness, the price that's 62% down from the October '07 top is 602, and the point where wave 5 on the diagram equals wave 1 is at 625...This is around the price where wave 'A' should end.

USO revisited....

Notice a 1.000 node coming up soon (middle chart)...

When does it land exactly? 3/19/09 Watch for a REAL bottom in USO possibly a few days either side of that date. That's normally what you would expect. The bounce back at the .75 node a few weeks ago was not something I had a lot of confidence in, as the .75 is a 'minor' node...

A little rally may be starting...

As I mentioned Saturday, the market is very oversold, and though a shorting opportunity is close, we may get a rally of a few days in here, so patience is advised. Historically, the last couple days of a month into the first couple days of the following month have a Bullish bias.

Saturday update...

The markets are starting to breakdown, Tim Wood at FinancialSense has given a Dow theory sell signal, and the dollar is strengthening again as I would expect it to, just as another decline starts. This time, Gold is rising instead of falling with the rising dollar, something I didn't anticipate. It's still unclear if that will continue. Shown is one of the $NDX charts, it's still dancing around the same levels as before, but these markets are weak, and it may start serious downside at any time. Both $NASI and $NYSI are now declining, so this too is giving a sell signal. I will be going into full Bear mode next week....Leveraged Bear ETF's are a good choice here......

Additional point, a Bearish entry might make more sense after the smoke clears from Obama's speech on Tuesday. Markets are short term oversold, so keep thus in mind, it may bounce from the after effects of the speech....

$NYSI and $NASI still topping...

Probably won't get a real decline until these do...

By the way, check out my link to ClubOrlov's site. Interesting, but grim, article
"Social Collapse best practices" has been posted, a talk Dmitri gave recently. Kind of sobering, but gives a good background on the theory of superpower collapse. Many similarities between the old USSR and the current USA.

Gold charts...

Remarkably, this does look like a possible breakout. It is more than rare for a downtrend that hasn't reached the .5000 node to end. We'll see what happens...

$NDX Charts

Precious metals and the market may be rolling over...

one of the $silver charts

This one is at a .250 node, and is overbought on daily RSI...Let's see what happens..

This market is on borrowed time...

This breadth indicator has hit the top blue trendline and rolled over...We have a pretty nice downsloping channel of parallel trendlines forming here...

current $USD charts...

Like the $Gold charts below, this chart is "young". The U.S. Dollar move "upward" has lots of time left in it.

current $GOLD charts

Hitting extremes of upper trendlines now...

It's uncommon for a Bear market in any commodity to end before the .5000 node, and we haven't cleared the .2500 nodes yet. Though many are calling for an immediate new bull market in $Gold, I remain skeptical....

I still expect the stock market to fall soon, the dollar to go up in response, and $Gold to resume it's correction....

current $NDX charts...

A new issue with the KDE interface has given me fits on my Linux box. Really Southwestern Bell/Yahoo caused it, and I had to find a workaround, but it prevented me from uploading files for a couple of days, but I have figured it out....

New $GOLD charts...

Getting close to some high trendlines again...charts are Friday's data...

What I would expect to happen, is, sometime soon, the markets resume their crash, making a 5th wave down (see chart and commentary in the previous post). Along with that, the dollar begins to rise again as it did in the most recent strong down cycle, and Gold will correct back downwards in response to the dollar...it's already flirting with some tough overhead resistance...

Rally running out of gas pretty soon?

It was never much to start with...

We are clearly a week or two (eyeball estimate) away from the top descending magenta line that has sort of delineated market exhaustion points...

Obviously, I have gone to a new look for this blog...

I hope it's easier on the eyes....

Survivor, the Home Game

I think it's ironic that for the past few years, "Reality Shows" have been all of the rage in television. Only the most ruthless and shifty would prevail, and the rest were "cast off of the island" (to die, in a virtual sense).

Only a vicious and hyper-competitive culture would produce such a set of monstrosities and call it entertainment, I now suspect that this set of attitudes has been mirroring structural changes in our economy which now threatens to exile "everyone" off the island, except perhaps, bankers cosy with Goldman Sachs and such.

We can all play survivor now.

An article I think is correct in it's views...

On the money, I think:

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/europe/article5559773.ece

Current $NDX charts...Haven't changed much...

Note that the secondary trend lines are all busted....no further support will come from those, probably...

The dollar and $Gold charts are virtually the same also...

Markets are dribbling along sideways...waiting for Obama Bounce?

Check out Mish's site for pictures of acres of unsold cars...Does anyone think they may stay unsold and be acres of rusting cars somewhere in the future? Somehow I think that could happen, and that would mean the end of the economic order that produced it....

Deep and sloppy $NDX bounce...

It's still suspect...

$NDX resting on major trendline...

It's got to hold here, or the Bear is back...

Actually, with Gold falling and the Dollar rising, these are the conditions that have signalled stock market liquidations in the recent past, so this is a perilous juncture we're at right now for the stock market...