Here Comes Turd, Hat In Hand

I must be a glutton for punishment.

In order to give all the Turdhaters some additional ammunition, I come to you today with another request for funding. The site needs improvements to keep it from crashing so often but the bills have stacked high while "revenue enhancement" plans have taken longer than expected to implement. Therefore, I need some help. More on that in a minute. First, the charts.

Longtime Turdites will recall how much of what I do is based upon "feel" and pattern recognition. When fighting within wholly-manipulated markets, these two traits allow you to survive. However, man does not exist on "feel" alone. Fundamentals such as simple supply/demand, the changes to Open Interest, the bullishness/bearishness of the CoT etc, all must be taken into consideration, as well. And currently, the fundos look great so why am I so uneasy?

Do you recall this chart from 3/28?

The crude fundos were, and continue to be, very strong. Very few doubt that crude will continue higher long-term based upon dollar devaluation and geo-political risk. However, a clear "line in the sand" had been drawn at 104.50-105.00 and all sorts of sell stops had been placed below that line. Then, even though the global crude oil market is enormous and dwarfs the gold and silver markets, the stops got "gunned". Here's the chart from two days later:

How did this happen? Was it manipulation? In this case, no. The crude oil market is too large and diverse to be openly manipulated like gold and silver. What happened was that a delicate balance of buyers and sellers was broken when buyers temporarily stepped away. With more sellers than buyers left in the arena, down went price, through 104.50. The sell stops were then triggered and price fell very sharply to $102. Though it has since recovered and even traded back above $105 yesterday, that fact is small consolation to those who got their guts ripped out on 3/30.

OK, so what's the point, you ask? I fear that we are in the verge of a similar event in the metals, particularly silver.

As discussed here extensively, interest and activity on the Comex is waning. Post-MFG, the primary participants left are the Cartel monkeys and the HFT WOPRs. There are times when they balance each other out but, since the WOPRs are mainly programmed to follow technicals, and, since the current technicals aren't overly friendly, we end up with an unbalanced paper market where sellers outnumber buyers. The balance to this is the physical demand we continue to see in London and other venues. Simply put, paper price declines to the point where physical demand appears, which forces paper price back up. A sort of equilibrium and the primary reason why gold and silver have been mostly rangebound for the past month.

My concern is this: If you were one of these sovereign or big money buyers in London, why wouldn't you simply step back for a few days and see just how low the Cartels are willing to push? Seriously, why the heck wouldn't you? You might be content to "scale in" with your purchases for a while but if the stupid, arrogant Western bankers are willing to jam paper price lower for you, why not let them? And, like the crude market of late March, all it will take is a day or two of no big physical buying and paper price will tank. You, the big buyer, then can come back in a week later or so and buy a whole bunch of physical at a steeply discounted price.

Now, look at the charts below for silver. Do they not resemble the crude charts for late March? There's a clear point where buyers have continually emerged around $31 to $31.35. Even if I were a "resolute long", prudence would demand that I have at least a few stops right under $31 because if $31 were to fail, silver is headed to $30 or perhaps even a little lower.

As you know, silver and gold are about 95% correlated so let's just say the scenario described above plays out. The big money buyers in London take a few days off and gold falls down through $1635 and toward $1615. What do you think would happen to silver? It would be 30 and change in a heartbeat! In the end, I'm not saying that silver is going to collapse within the next hour. I'm simply warning you that, like crude in late March, this type of event is possible. On the bright side, like crude, silver will base and quickly recover. Like crude, the fundamentals are too strong to keep it down for long and any drop toward $30 in silver would be an excellent opportunity to BTFD.

OK, back to the problem at hand with the site. I'm sure that most of you have noticed that the site has a tendency to lock up and crash during traffic spikes. I've had the Tech Team looking into it and they've concluded that it's primarily due to all the fancy, little fun stuff that I wanted built into it...the HatTips, the titles for each member like Muckman and Stomachlobber, even the liberty to post and store any video or picture you wish to post slows down the site. Most of the time, everything is fine but, when hundreds of folks try to refresh pages at once, the resulting traffic "bottleneck" is giving us fits. The good news is that this can be fixed. The bad news is that it will cost me a few bucks to do it.

So, I must ask you to consider helping out. The idea behind the subscription component of the site was to generate consistent monthly revenue. I had planned for the monthly fee to be under $5. Please ask yourself if this is reasonable. Do you get 17 cents per day worth of enjoyment, camraderie and knowledge from the site. If so, please consider enrolling for an ongoing donation. By clicking the "Feed The Turd" button to the right, you'll be directed to a PayPal screen where you can donate once or set yourself up for an ongoing, $5/month (or more) donation. Even simple, one-time donations can make a big difference. If the 25,000 or so individuals who visit this site daily all donated just a dollar, we'd be cooking. Anyway...as anyone who has donated in the past knows, each and every contribution is valued and important to me. I don't take this responsibility lightly and I don't take you for granted. However, the site is running on fumes financially so I feel I must make this request. Thank you for your consideration.

Hopefully, sometime soon, site revenues will increase. Once we are turning a profit, I still hope to schedule Turdapalooza, complete with open bar. Maybe that's just a silly dream but I hope not. The image in my head of 1000 big yellow hats "protesting" in front of 33 Liberty Street is too compelling to ignore.

Thank you all for your support, financial and otherwise. Keep the faith and keep stacking. TF

About the Author

Founder
tfmetalsreport [at] gmail [dot] com ()

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Key Economic Events Week of 3/25

3/25 8:25 ET Goon Bostic
3/25 9:05 ET Goon Ghoulsbee
3/25 10:00 ET New Home Sales
3/25 10:30 ET Goon Cook
3/26 8:30 ET Durable Goods
3/26 9:00 ET Case-Shiller home prices
3/26 10:00 ET Consumer Confidence
3/28 8:30 ET Q4 GDP final guess
3/28 9:45 ET Chicago PMI
3/28 10:00 ET Pending home sales
3/28 10:00 ET UMich final
3/29 8:30 ET PCE and Core PCE
3/29 8:30 ET Personal Inc and Spend
3/29 11:30 ET Chief Goon Powell

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