"When misguided public opinion honors what is despicable and despises what is honorable, punishes virtue and rewards vice, encourages what is harmful and discourages what is useful, applauds falsehood and smothers truth under indifference or insult, a nation turns its back on progress and can be restored only by the terrible lessons of catastrophe." … Frederic Bastiat


Evil talks about tolerance only when it’s weak. When it gains the upper hand, its vanity always requires the destruction of the good and the innocent, because the example of good and innocent lives is an ongoing witness against it. So it always has been. So it always will be. And America has no special immunity to becoming an enemy of its own founding beliefs about human freedom, human dignity, the limited power of the state, and the sovereignty of God. – Archbishop Chaput

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Monday, May 14, 2012

HUI Fails to Confirm the Upside Reversal Day of Last Week

Today's selling downdraft in the broader US equity markets, when combined with more of the risk off trades, derailed the tentative Upside Reversal Day posted last week in the HUI. You might recall that I mentioned it might be prudent to get some additional upside price action before becoming too convinced that we had a sure bottom in the mining sector shares.

The reason for this is that far too many of both these upside reversal patterns and downside reversal patterns are being generated by the nature of computer algorithmic trading. In times past we would see these patterns form ONLY AFTER A PROLONGED UPTREND OR DOWNTREND when prices had reached extreme levels of valuation.

Commercial traders, whose business deals with the actual physical commodity and who understand "VALUE" better than most traders, would be moving in to cover existing shorts in large size/instituting fresh longs or liquidating long positions/instituting fresh shorts in large size when they spotted these extreme valuation levels. Their buying or selling would be of such magnitude that the market would then reverse course.

Today's BRAINLESS HEDGE FUNDS have no such understanding of VALUE nor do they even make any attempts to discover what value might be. How can they when you have a collection of mindless machines doing the thinking for this lazy group of traders? To decipher value one must have a thorough FUNDAMENTAL KNOWLEDGE of the market that they trade. Such knowledge takes many years to formulate particularly during which the traders gets to witness firsthand changes in supply/demand structures affecting the market(s) that they choose to trade.

What we get nowadays a result of these runamok algorithms, is every single machine on the planet buying or selling merely because the last trade price happened to either go up or down. There is no understanding of WHY there is buying or selling. All anyone knows is that a "bunch of other machines" are buying or selling so just go with them.

The result is what we saw last week in the HUI. Apparently there was enough profit taking in the ratio spread trade that it forced the shares higher. Once a technical level was taken out on the upside, additional algorithm trading then took over to take the HUI through the previous day's high closing a chart gap on the Daily in the process.




However, and this is the key - there was little to no SERIOUS Followthrough buying that occurred to thereby validate the signal. The result was that the buying present last week evaporated in the face of fresh selling.

The close today was not at all constructive with the index not only taking out the previous LOW of that reversal day but also CLOSING below that level. This gives the bears fresh fodder at this point so we will now have to wait to see subsequent price action to get a hint or sign that a serious bottom is at hand. If the market can quickly reverse to the upside and take out today's high, we might have had another one of these all-too-frequent head fakes.

Let's see what we get moving forward this week.

8 comments:

  1. Jim Sinclair should admit that he was wrong and Martin Armstrong was right!

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  2. HUI getting clobbered again. Gonna be a long summer.

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  3. Talk about a bloodbath. I have multiple miners down double digit % points. WTF!

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  4. Now the authors in King World News sound desperate, they ALL due for admitting wrong suggestions to the readers!!!

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  5. All miners should have been dumped when the HUI fell below 460 (GDM 1340).

    337 / 985 target.

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  6. I guess the HUI is going to test support at about the 340 level now.

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  7. Trader Dan has been pretty good about levels of support on the HUI / danger of this free fall.
    Quality miners will be a good buy at some point. falling knife blah blah. That said, other commodity producers non-US based have fallen nearly as far--Canadian oil producers, Petrobras, etc...

    I agree that some of the King World commentators were pumping through the year. My personal favorite (opposite) is Rick Rule, who was essentially pumping miners last fall, then said this spring, if you bought shares in 2010-2011, that's a tough lesson...

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  8. Is Rick Rule still pumping his "favorite play", geothermal?? He said Ram Power was a no brainer at $3. It's 26 cents right now!

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