Gold & silver stocks still looking toppy

Here’s GDX, 1-hour bar:

TD Ameritrade

Jim Rogers discusses his euro long and stock shorts

I happen to have similar positions at the moment, though unlike Rogers, I’m a bear on commodities and China, which he seems to be perpetually long.  Here’s today’s Bloomberg interview.

Take-aways:

– Long euro as a contrary position. Too many shorts out there.

– All these countries (Spain, Portugal, UK, US) are spending money they don’t have and it will continue.

– ECB buying government and private debt is wrong.

– EU is ignoring its own rules about bailouts from Maastricht Treaty.

– Governments are still trying to solve a problem of too much debt with more debt.

– Fundamentals are bad for all paper currencies. Good for gold.

– Is “contagion” limited now? Well, for those who get the money…

Here’s a longer interview from a few days ago on the same topics as well as stocks:

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– Rogers has a few stock shorts: emerging market index, NASDAQ stocks, and a large international financial institution.

– Rogers owns both silver and gold, but is not buying any more. He’s not buying anything here, “just watching.”

– Optimistic about Chinese currency. Expected it to rise more and faster, but still bullish.

– Thinking of adding shorts in next week or two if markets rally (my note: they have now).

– “Debts are so staggering, we’re all going to get hit with the problem,” no longer just our children and grandchildren.

One sell signal to rule them all.

You know the one: the 5-day trailing average equity put:call ratio:

indexindicators.com

Retail options players almost never get significantly more complacent than this, and they virtually ALWAYS get creamed within a week or two, sometimes a little, sometimes a lot. If you did nothing in the market but buy puts or vol when the 5-day CPCE got under 2 standard deviations from its mean and sell or tighten your stop (use a conditional stop with options) when it reached 1SD you’d have a very nice trading career.

Couple this with the classic RSI signal from Friday, and I’d place the odds of a 2% further rise here at under 10%, and the odds of a 5% decline at over 80%. To be very conservative, wait a couple of days to confirm that the rise is broken, and use a stop against the highs, but I bet stocks stall here for no more than a week then fall hard. Maybe this is Oct 2007 redux. Sure smells like a big top circus. The latest EWI publication points out that the AAII survey is again at record lows — this is not as precise a timing indicator as 5-day CPCE, but it puts it in perspective: we’re looking for a major top, so any minor top like this could be the one.

There you have it: sell the Dow

Got a double sell signal on the 90-min RSI, and a very nice weakening trend:

Prophet.net (I’m going to miss these guys — they were bought by Investools and they are shutting down the site)

Copper looks set to fall hard.

Let’s start with the Wall Street line, courtesy of Bloomberg this week:

Demand will be strong next year as consumption gains in China, the world’s biggest metal user, said Andrew Karsh, a co- manager of funds for the Credit Suisse Total Commodity Return Strategy team, which oversees about $4.4 billion.

“Industrial metals are a favorite of ours,” Karsh said yesterday in a telephone interview from New York. “There is real demand growing from emerging markets. Copper, lead, aluminum and other metals are required to increase infrastructure in places like China and India.”

This trader isn’t buying it, and as we’ll see below, China’s got more of the red metal than it knows what to do with.

Source: stockcharts.com

From kitcometals.com, here is a 5-year chart of copper warehouse stocks:

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Sure looks like someone took delivery of over a quarter million tonnes of London copper this spring and summer. Unfortunately for the bulls, it just went from warehouses on the Thames to warehouses on the Yangtse, and now it’s looking for a new home!

Chinadaily.com reports:

Copper stockpiles held in duty-free warehouses in China, the top user, may be re-exported after surging to as much as 350,000 tons from almost none at the start of the year, according to Xi’an Maike Metal International Group.

“We can hardly find buyers for refined copper,” said Luo Shengzhang, general manager of the copper department at Xi’an Maike. The company ranks among the country’s three biggest importers, according to the executive. “China’s got to export some copper from now and next year,” Luo said in an interview.

Copper, used to make pipes and wires, has more than doubled this year as China’s 4-trillion-yuan ($586 billion) stimulus spending, increased State stockpiling and lack of scrap material boosted China’s imports to a record. That’s helped to drive Chinese prices below London’s since at least July.

Xi’an Maike has had to re-route some bonded copper to London Metal Exchange warehouses in South Korea because the company was unable to find buyers in China, with local supply outpacing demand, said Luo. The effect of the stimulus package was wearing off and local scrap supply was improving, he said.

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And this from Mineweb.com:

Some of the more telling lines from a translated script of the CCTV (China’s national news channel) program (which I assume to be accurate) include:

• Wang Chao lived in Anxin county of Hebei province (rural area). He is in charge of a metal scrap collecting company. He used to purely take commissions for collecting scrap. Since 1H 2009, he started stocking scraps. He told CCTV his business now is like ‘gambling.’ Not only him, Mr. Wang said many people in his town have stocked a lot of metal at their home.
• They told CCTV they believe the metal prices will ‘certainly rise’, and they have ‘a lot of’ stocks. For example, he said, in Laohetou county, every household has dozens to hundred tonnes of copper. Nobody wants to sell. They believe copper price will goes back to Rmb70,000/tonne from currently Rmb40,000/tonne.
• Traders in Wenzhou city of Zhejiang province: A business man told CCTV, they use a lot of bank loans and bought a lot of metals for stocking. For one warehouse, he stocked at least 15 Kt to 20 Kt of copper. For his total personal metal inventories, he invested Rmb1-2 bn. He believe all metal prices will surge with inflation.
• A non-ferrous metal warehouse manager, Mr Qin Baoqing in Wusong District of Shanghai. He said many metals cannot be put in their warehouse, so they have to leave them in the backyard. Many stocks have not been moved for 3 months now. For example, he said, they have many aluminium stocks from Lanzhou Aluminium, Guizhou Aluminium, etc.
• He Jinbi from Maike (metal trading company). He told CCTV they saw many farmers in Guangdong province stocking more than 100 tonnes of aluminium at home. These people used to raise geese for living.
• Because the interest rate is too low in China. Many farmers could make hundreds of RMB profits per tonne, with dozens of Rmb per tonne cost of interests. They use their existing inventories to borrow more from banks. Banks are very ‘happy’ to lend to them.

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In a depression, which do you want, gold or copper?

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In the short-term though, keep in mind that like so much else, copper has been trading very much as an anti-dollar. Recently it has looked like a somewhat muted silver contract. As I am fairly bullish near-term on silver (playing for a bounce but not new highs), I’m going to wait and see if I can get a higher entry for a copper short.

Blow-off tops everywhere

Everywhere I look this morning I see spikes in risk assets: copper, silver, oil, the pound, stocks, credit, etc.  Copper and oil are moving tick for tick in lock step at the moment. These really are all the same market.

I recently read about a strategy whereby a trader would start “trading campaigns” 25k to risk on very high payoff black swan events. If his first short-term options trade was a winner, he would do another with the proceeds, and if that trade also worked, one more, for a total of three trades. The math can actually be highly favorable for of such a strategy, since for a good timer, the payoff can be dozens of times the initial capital. All you need is one winning streak in 10 or so campaigns to come out way ahead. This trader had attempted 9 such campaigns, 7 of which were 100% losers, 1 of which was flat, and one of which was a 60-bagger. He had socked away the proceeds from the 60-bagger, and was still trading 25k at a time. I’m not saying I’ll adopt this method, but it makes a good point about humans’ tendency to underestimate and underprice the probability of large moves, as well as their irrational risk aversion when it comes to the possibility of losing 100% in any one trade.

That old-time feeling…

Robert Prechter said back in February that some aspects of this bounce would resemble the euphoria of the all-time top in equities. Well, when I looked at the market today and saw that Amazon has rocketed up to its 2000 and 2007 peaks (albeit on pathetic and waning volume this go-around) and sports a 60+ PE, I got a tingle of that giddy feeling I had when I was buying puts hand over fist on stocks like this two years ago. Back then the whole market looked like this, but there are some great set-ups being formed this summer.

We are now solidly overbought as well as ridiculously overvalued. We may be witnessing the last gasp of the great post-1995 equity bubble.

Source: Yahoo! Finance

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A word of caution: when the NASDAQ runs like this, it can keep on going for weeks, so don’t get run over going short-term short. This kind of momentum should drive the VIX under 20 before long. That would signal near-total complacency in the face of economic fundamentals whose only parallel, and there can no longer be any dispute here, lies with the Great Depression: link to pdf from Sprott Asset Management.

Still bearish on the yellow metal

As many readers know, I have been bearish on gold lately. I have been buying puts on GLD and GDX and bought more yesterday, though I do have a big chunk of assets in bullion (20x more than in puts). My bullion is not for sale, but I suspect that the reality of deflation and its likely duration has yet to fully sink in, and that we are due for a demoralizing event in the gold market.

Gold is not fully treated as money at the moment, though fiat currencies don’t satisfy all of the criteria for money either. Only precious metals can fully satisfy them, when governments allow.

So gold is not really money now, since its liquidity is limited, but it is a long-term store of value that outlasts currencies and governments. This is the key point: from the perspective of a large player who can afford warehouse costs, other metals or commodities can also serve as a store of value and hedge against fiscal calamity. Copper and cotton and rice will never go to zero either.

Almost all other commodities are down by huge percentages, though gold hangs on. It makes sense for gold to outperform the others, since it is more liquid and portable and people naturally prefer it during a crisis, but the premium seems way too high.

Once this panic phase of the depression is over, and a general funk and low-velocity environment settles in, with the dollar and other currencies having survived to the surprise of so many gold owners, the metal could be again seen as dead weight and fall as people still need plain old folding money to pay their bills, debts and taxes.

That is how I see things. Only time will tell if I am right.

What a close. Down 473 points in 15 minutes.

I have built up a position in DIA Nov. 08 puts on rallies over the past couple of weeks, and with the Dow up 300 at 3:30 today, I couldn’t resist adding a few more than I would ordinarily be comfortable with. I intended to part with the extra contracts maybe tomorrow or the next day in the inevitable correction after such an awesome rally (1,208 points, 14.8%). As it turned out, the Dow proceeded to drop 473 points in about 15 minutes, and I unloaded the contracts at the close for the fastest money I’ve ever made (as regular readers know, I’m more fond of buying LEAPs to capture the big, multi-month moves).

From Bigcharts.com, here’s the 1-day chart (1 minute):

Click image for sharper view.

As I count the Elliott Waves, this pattern has the A-B-C shape characteristic of a countertrend move, so it doesn’t change my expectation for new index lows in the coming days or couple of weeks. The mini-crash at the close looks like waves 1, 2, 3 and 4 of an impulse wave, which would resolve with another drop below the wave 4 low near the open tomorrow. Impulse waves move in the direction of the one-larger degree trend, as opposed to A-B-C moves.

Today’s chart also illustrates another textbook pattern: the contracting zig-zag from 2:40 to 3:15 resolved in the direction of the previous trend — up, way up. The 1-month pattern is still a very large contracting zig-zag, which, should it stay true to form, would resolve downwards, perhaps to Dow 7000, though a push above the October 14th high first is also possible:

Click for sharper view.

All of this near-term wave counting and trading is really just a hobby for me. I don’t use big money in it, but just enough to keep my attention so that I learn something. My real money is in T-bills, gold and still a boatload of 2010 puts that I accumulated over the last 15 months (see disclaimer), though I have been paring that position in the crash. If I hadn’t been selling, it would be about 85% of my portfolio by now.

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Sorry for the paucity of posts lately. I’m in the middle of a trans-oceanic move, ditching a ridiculous Latin American country for a central European one known for staying sane while the rest of the world goes nuts.

SEC intends to ban short selling. Government boxcars reported in Greenwich.

Hedge fund managers said to pack dirt under fingernails, roughen hands on bricks to avoid suspicion and possible shipment to North Dakota re-education camps.

These days it seems like we are living in an Onion article (1 , 2). It would be funny if it were not the end of the world as we know it.

I’ve been a bear since spring of 2006, preparing for a depression since early 2007, and have had no illusions about the death of the idea that was America. I saw these events coming a mile away, but the speed with which they have arrived is shocking.

By edict of the Duma…

I figured that the shorting ban (WSJ article) would pop up somewhere near the midpoint of the bear market, maybe Dow 8000, but this train to Animal Farm is an express. When will they ban international money transfers? Unapproved foreign travel? Gold?

The speed with which our leaders are dropping any pretense of respect for markets just makes me that much more bearish. 8000 could be next month, not next year as I had figured. And I have to rethink my bottom target of 3500. Really, that would not be the end of the world — this market started at 800 back in 1982, and you have to remember that equity values go POOF after an economy gets as leveraged as ours is. 75% stock market drops are not black swans. They follow credit bubbles like day follows night.

Markets are so bourgeois, anyway.

The possibility of Dow zero just ticked up a standard deviation or two. What happened to the Moscow stock exchange after 1917 anyway?

The end of the stock market? Impossible, right? Well, if our Bolsheviks enact their desires to use government funds to buy all manner of securities (as the Russians are now doing), they could eventually own everything, not just the mortgage market and a huge insurer.

Buyout mania, with a twist.

If a security’s market price is $10 and the government offers $20, that is not ‘market support’, that is a buyout. Of course, there are limits to this sort of nationalization, namely the difference in scale between the Fed’s $900 billion balance sheet and the many tens of trillions of dollars in US private equity and debt instruments, so at first they will be very selective (ahem), but they do have two tools to help them work around those limits: printing presses and guns. In a few short years, when the former lose their potency, the latter can be brought to the fore.

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PS — Of course, my opinion is that this rally (futures are up 2% on top of today’s dramatic close) is just a short squeeze and dead cat bounce. The air pocket under stocks just got a whole lot bigger. 90-day T-bills last traded at 0.07%. The stall warning light is still on.