News

Troubling Thursday begins with a mandatory market check.  Which, in the early Futures pricing today was about what you’d expect for Index Options Day. Dow futures were pointing down some 130-points in the early going. Upon inspection of our Aggregate Index, we see how troubled markets are lining up for a possible downside surprise next … Read More

This being Technical Tuesday, I want to focus a little attention on A.I. because “we small humans” have gotten a lot of past, dangerous, scary technology mostly wrong. Two examples are radio’s invention and atomic physics.  Chosen because they demonstrate what happens when a technology is “done right – sort of – and when it’s done dead … Read More

Money Monday offers a choice of economic wars to focus on.  We’ll toss out the easy ones first. Commie-fornia – the People’s Republik as it’s been called – is now featuring a new quite disgusting pander to Mob Rule.  (It’s what communist insurgencies do, after all.) See, at the heart of anti-American socialist engineering is … Read More

Although I got the major PITA project I’ve been putting off partly done Saturday, the real satisfaction came from wiring up the BBQ outlet this week. However, it was a fine study in how “little projects” can turn into Big ones on the clock. The idea sounded simple enough.  We had run an extension cord from … Read More

Retail Sales are just out, so let’s depart from drama, disdain delay, and dispense duration… “Advance estimates of U.S. retail and food services sales for March 2023, adjusted for seasonal variation and holiday and trading-day differences, but not for price changes, were $691.7 billion, down 1.0 percent (±0.5 percent) from the previous month, but up … Read More

My consigliere – a wizened tax attorney – is more than slightly savvy on Money.  He was projecting an “economic showdown with China” as early as 1979. And here we are… So, when he called to talk about the “hollow money” problem – we both (being students of Long Wave Economics – knew exactly what … Read More

Three smallish data points today kick off our Reality Review.  These are not the most gossiped thing on social, which focuses on anything Orange, and stories like Dalai Lama, 87, apologises after kissing young boy on the lips and asking child to ‘suck’ his tongue. Thanks, pass.  Well, sort of… Smaller stories – the ones that get glossed over … Read More

I told subscribers my trading position Saturday:  yes, I went short into the close on pre-holiday Thursday. Just in the last hour, a bearish tone has emerged and in our Aggregated Markets view of things, hard down is likely if the lower support level (lower right) breaks in today’s trading: If the light-colored ascending channel … Read More

With European markets on “chill” for the Day After Easter, and with the U.S. markets spongy as gold prices are down a bit, seems to us like a fine morning for a balanced outlook. Oh sure, easy from a raw economics standpoint to point at a growing pile of stories about the pending recession – … Read More

Prepping note: The battery on the old Kubota is on its last legs. It’s a 51-R series, and they ain’t cheap.  So, I was trying to get the maximum possible service life out of it.  Put it on an 8-amp charger and then got into some pulse charging on top of that… Even after 2 … Read More

Yes, the stock market is closed.  Good Friday, don’tcha know. But this warms me to our first Agenda Item.  What’s so “Good” about “Good Friday?”  To cite from Wikipedia (Etymology entry): “‘Good Friday’ comes from the sense ‘pious, holy’ of the word “good”.[13] Less common examples of expressions based on this obsolete sense of “good” include … Read More

Ure has turned over a new leaf:  shorter reports. Just not today. Job Cuts First Second horse pick in the weekly financial trifecta:  Challenger Job Cuts: “Job Cuts Rise 15% in March 2023, Up 319% from Same Month Last Year, Highest Q1 Since 2020 | Challenger, Gray & Christmas, Inc. (challengergray.com) Which then continues with … Read More