A good friend of mine once said to me “Argentus – Where do you think the psychopaths are in our society?”
I replied, “In prison, or mental hospitals I suppose” and he nodded. “You left out the rest who haven’t been diagnosed or caught yet. They’re active at the top of organizations, political parties, and business”.
This chap works in the prison service and had a direct knowledge of that which he spoke.
So let’s look at psychopaths for a minute. First the descriptive name. It’s a medical term that denotes lack of ability to feel or empathize for others. Cruelty to small creatures during childhood years is indicative of this mindset. But since there are degrees of psychopathy, and since the medical term is (A) inflexible whereas people change during the day/week/lifespan, and (B) implies they are something special and different in the current fashion to have a special term for every variation which creates false lines of division, whereas the truth is a seamless sliding scale of variation of humans .... I prefer to use an older and better term for these people. They are selfish assholes.
I have my own sliding scale which works like this: on the left side of my imaginary measuring ruler I have normal people in all their many forms. Then as I move towards the edge I get to self-centred individuals. To the far side of those are selfish people who keep their selfishness private in their own life and behaviour. To the far edge of these lie more selfish people who live that way, but also apply their life principle (or lack of it, you decide) to those around them, and these I call assholes. Beyond these lie a group of selfish assholes who like to “go out and apply their powers” to those below or vulnerable to their actions. These are complete assholes. And beyond these are the uber version of the emotionless, the Total F*ck*ng Assholes - capitalized for both effect and descriptiveness. Let’s call these TFAs for convenience.
I would remind that there is no special political orientation for a selfish asshole, unless it also serves their personal needs. In that case the politics is compelling ... not them but for others ... for the asshole, politics is a tool, just that. So left-leaning or right-leaning, communist or fascist, red or blue, black, white, brown or yellow it doesn’t matter. Each group will have selfish assholes trying to worm their way up the organization of the group so they can wield it’s power and use it for their personal gain. Whether they get control depends upon the other people present and their character, the normal people who might choose to go along to get along, alternatively could put a stop to the cold hearted ruthless individual’s career path while they still remain above the individual in question.
To counter this possible control the selfish asshole will always form a clique, then later on, form a larger group or party, even a national army, of like minded people to his or herself, and that reduces the likelihood of this happening. But we always knew the basic principle underlying this : bad people form gangs to help them get what they want.
In my past I worked with hundreds of businesses, corporate and private. And it was something I learned that within about 2 minutes of first contact with an organization at it’s lower levels of staff, I could tell what personality type the CEO had in the sense of whether he was a TFA or not. We used to joke about this transparency among ourselves in office conversations. You see, everybody down the line in a corporation soon figures out what you must do to get ahead, and they adopt the behavioural patterns of the ultimate boss.
It would be tempting to further explore this idea of the non-human-feelings-inside psychopath, or TFA - which can be and often is - a corporation, or nation state, but I have not that much space here to do it. I am now going to pick my target more precisely.
Please note if you prefer to call yourself an “investor” or “stacker” you are still a trader only in the longer term!
So I will focus my attention on a different emotionless entity with which we gold and silver traders must deal and live with it’s behaviour. That is the market.
Every financial market is a TFA of the highest order, and you had better recognize that or it will hurt you. If you are the sort of person who uses phrases like "I feel such and such will happen .... " then you may be especially vulnerable when dealing with the market. Emoting does not help in this game.
For the purposes of this text, I propose that the market can be considered as a symbiotic group organism, like a nation state, or a termites’ mound. I thinks that today, the market can become, just for a few minutes, a beehive.
So every day the beehive wakes up at opening time, though there is a little activity before that, and business gets really going. The minions of the beehive go about their daily activities taking nectar from the flowers and storing the honey. The security detachment guard the honey, doling out small amounts as rewards and incentives to the group members involved. They sting the hell out of anyone found trying to take all the honey. It’s a process, like a computer program running, and there is not emotion involved. It is self perpetuating, self replicating, and self protecting. Really like a corporation in many ways. Really like a TFA too.
So some similarities with the markets should be coming to reader’s attention already. We by the way are the flowers in this case, as we get a service (investment provision) in return for our nectar (fees!). But that’s all we get, and the fees are high and the service is not so great. Well the bees are not working for us, they work for the hive. We are colleagues, not partners. So what happens if we decide to get proactive and “go get ourselves some of that there nice honey”? Well we get to meet the soldiers and experience a different side of the bees than we hitherto knew of.
Please now flip your attention fully to the gold and silver markets.
This time I take the predator-prey relationship of honey stealing bears and bees. The bears have driven it down and PMs are standing their ground. The bears will attack again to drive PMs down some more. Flip back to the beehive for a moment. The bears came and took the honey in a surprise attack end 2012. They mounted another surprise attack April 2013 and took more honey. November-December 2013 the bears came back and took more golden honey. (see what I did there – I picked this analogous model of the bees carefully ! ) .
Well for every action there is a reaction. In 2012 there was little reaction to a surprise. Gold declined. In April 2013 there was a greater reaction to the decline and substantial buying was initiated at lows. In December there was an even greater reaction, and gold failed to make a significant new low, due to the reaction of buying into weakness.
There is an army of buyers waiting for new weakness, so if they are really there, when the bears attack again, can gold decline much more? That remains to be seen. The discussion thus far should indicate that the effort required to break the resolve of millions of buyers lurking around the lows will be gigantic. The bears are powerful, but finite. Money creation weakens bond markets and they absolutely need to borrow and print. Either the one or the other will weaken their case against a strong gold price. They want to first print, and sell bonds at high price, and have a weak gold price. It's not so easy doing that now.
Preparations have been made. Let the late bears come. We are the bees!
We, together with some of our less cooperative nation state colleagues are waiting for late bears to come and we will buy what golden assets the bears make available during an attack. The bears suspect this of course. They have excellent information sources, better than is right or just. Therefore expect little lightning raids at dawn rather than the all out attack which exposes too much.
Argentus Maximus
The author posts daily commentary on the gold and silver markets in the TFMR forum: The Setup For The Big Trade. More information about the author & his work can be found here: RhythmNPrice.
This is not investment advice, but rather educational material for discussion, and entertainment. Readers are expected to obtain professional advice from a qualified member of the financial services industry before risking their assets in the financial markets. All the above ideas and discussion should be prefaced with the words: "in my humble opinion and as best I can tell from what I see at the moment ...."
