Pailin's Trading Corner

World fundos continuing to break down.  Everything ultra-shaky and unstable.  European technocrats really losing bowel and bladder control, at this point (the Greek FinMin fiasco?  Unbelievable!  This is sub-Banana Republic stuff--more like cannibalism, and Cargo Cults...)

By the end of summer, it will be obvious to everyone that the clown in the WH is not going to get his economic deus ex, and will be going down.  Political ops can only shape, they cannot create.  Therefore (here's the bad part), they will begin a scorched-earth policy, using executive orders, last-minute regs, etc., to leave as big a mess as possible for the next crew, and making it almost impossible to accomplish anything substantive.

Just call me Mr. Happy...

Had a very good trading day today Titus, in part using your useful times of day trades. Thank you for your fine records and for sharing them with us.

I've come to terms with this market.  Nobody should be surprised by today.  Volatility is now the name of the game.  I will still try to predict for my own purposes, but it will only be tentatively.   I can't remember who said it was going to be volatile year at the beginning of 2012. Either an author I read or somebody on this board.  Maybe both.  Congrats to whom ever.

I think it was ol' Rhino Horn, or Rick Rule...but I also recall one or the other saying to expect intra-day moves of up $100.

"As for oil prices, the incident will have a mixed effect. Unless it cuts production, Saudi Arabia will have to find new buyers for the crude that was earmarked for the refinery, weighing on oil prices. But the premium on regional wholesale gasoline may be pushed higher by the prolonged loss of supply, which should help buoy profit margins at rivals such as Valero and ExxonMobil." http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/06/25/us-usa-refinery-motiva-idUSBRE85O02720120625

Sometime the magic works; sometimes it doesn't.

There's no way to know what profit/loss a particular pattern will bring or how long it will stick around.  You can only try to find the existing repeating patterns and hope that a strongly consistent pattern will translate into strongly favorable odds.  Even when a pattern continues to strongly repeat, it will generally be susceptible to deviations; very few profitable patterns in gold repeat every time.  (The Monday short 2am-11am is a good example: it had worked 7 of the last 7 times; it worked again today, though just barely, which would make it 8 of the last 8.  But that is unusual.)

Gold is without question very rich in repeating/cyclic patterns.  From my analysis, it sure seems that the existence of strong repeating patterns is becoming more and more prevalent -- especially since the beginning of 2010.  Though it seems maybe that they are starting to shift more frequently.

For Tuesday, my spreadsheet is telling me to try this:

short now until Tuesday 5am; long 5am-11am; short 11am until afternoon or later.

That's pretty much the vanilla daily time-of-day trade, but that is what my spreadsheet is recommending to me for Tuesday.  Hope I don't get totally screwed.  Anything is possible in these markets, so you just have to be ready for a big move in the wrong direction.

Has anyone else noticed that gold has been oscillating between up-weeks and down-weeks for 7 weeks now?  If that trend continues, this will be an up-week.

But the daily time-of-day trade of buy@5am / sell@10:30am sure made a lot of money over those 7 weeks -- the time-of-day trends don't seem to care much what the general market direction is.  But like I said, it failed last week pretty hard for the first time since April 1st.  So I'm not sure if the time is shifting or what.  It could be just an FOMC week aberration.  (I didn't trade most of last week.)

@Pailin: I think your point from Friday was that we've dropped pretty strong over the last few days so perhaps the rubber band was stretched enough for now, and we're going to snap back for a bit.  If that is kind of what you meant, I agree with you.  For now, I guess we should be some more snap before we go down more, but I won't bet one way or the other on that.

COT data makes pretty charts, I like pretty charts.  I agree with you, I look to COT data to signal more longer term trend changes, it's hard to manipulate data over months or years long timeframe.  I think maybe best used to confirm price action and speculate on possible size of new trend change.

They are both just "men" ---sometimes right, sometimes wrong.

Having read Jim for about a decade and Martin first back when he was in prison - I'd have to say that Jim has been consistent the entire time....never a short term guy, but generally hits the medium term stuff.  While his short term has been off as of recent, I'll still wager most of it will unfold in due time.  

Armstrong is solid as well......but again, all these guys are "men" ----- very smart and versed in their matters, but they put their pants on the same way as we do.  Pull or discard what you want from their comments and learn from it all.  

I'm thankful that both take the time to share with the public.

Man, I had no idea of the past between Armstrong and GATA.

Here's a collection of articles about Armstrong.  Very interesting reading.  A lot of stuff I had no idea about.

http://www.scribd.com/doc/14268839/8-Point-6

Titus.....nice find.  Wow, these articles paint the picture for me MUCH further.  The details on the Japanese deals "Enigma of Armstrong" could prove to be a movie plot.