George Ure

New Reader Note: Our most serious articles on Long Wave Economics are over on the www.peoplenomics.com site and the one Sunday about how to build your own Options Radar to look into the future is pretty doggone interesting.

The Worst News First.  I was right calling the long wave top in 2000.  On an inflation adjusted basis.

Remember that?  And I have told critics since that although the 2007-2008 high looked like a new high, it wasn’t when you use an Aggregate Approach to the market. 

Yes the Dow and S&P did good, but what about the $5-$8 trillion that was blown up in the Dot Com Bubble?  No one wants to remember that, but it was very real and it still has to be included in honest calculations about markets and economy.

Which is why I spent far too much time this weekend (most of Sunday) staring into my Options Radar and wondering why there is an options oddity in December.

Our Options Radar hints that Friday’s notion was 1,450 down to 1,400 on the S&P. 

My consigliore thinks it’s because the options crowd is trying to salt year-end bonuses, but we shall see what today’s options data looks like after the close.

At the moment, futures are looking for a hard down which should continue through tomorrow and then we’ll maybe get a “turn-around Tuesday.”

Regardless, my friend Robin Landry’s work suggests that this move down MIGHT hold at S&P 1,812-1,820.  Which would be nice.

There are some real drivers in here to keep an eye on.

One is the SSE  (Shanghai Stock Exchange) which dropped more than 8% overnight.  And that’s leading to a global 2-3% downturn in markets today.  The dollar is tanking vis-à-vis the Euro which is a kind of de facto devaluation.

But let me explain this Aggregate Index of mine that is updated twice weekly on our subscriber side, www.peoplenomics.com.

The index is built on the notion of putting equal dollars in 2000 into the Dow, the S&P, and the NASDAQ Composite.

When you double-click that chart above, you’ll see it is rotated.  And that’s EXACTLY the effect of inflation.

As to specifics:  The week of March 24, 2000, my Aggregate stood at 13,091.83.

Where should the Aggregate be today, just using the Minneapolis Fed inflation calculator?

17,989.14.    This is NOT where the Dow should be, this is where our proprietary Aggregate should be.  My Aggregate closed at 15,405.09 Friday.

Well, guess what?  Never made it.  16,898.64 was the high-water mark on July 17 and our Trading Model turned negative the week ending July 3.  7 out of 8 weeks since, the Model has been screaming “Down We Go!”

Yeah…so what does this have to do with the headlines?

Well, tomorrow (Asia time, which is tonight our time in ‘Merica) the Chinese market comes to a major inflection point.  I’d explain in Elliott Wave terms, but you’d glaze over.

The main thing is, if the Fed is going to do anything to hold the slide in the markets, they MUST make a major announcement today.

The two likely choices are?

1.  They could announce NO RATE HIKE UNTIL THE ECONOMY FURTHER IMPROVES.  Bully-pulpit QE-4.

2,  They could also simply announce QE-4 because as we explained in our Peoplenomics analysis this weekend, the flow of imports is going back up.

3.  The USA  could hint that we are going to Devalue, too.  In which case, American exports would become more competitive.  Exports might increase and gold would go to the moon.,  But there would be plenty of pain.  Forex markets are doing it, regardless.

If they DON’T come up with a “surprise announcement” early this week, as my fixed income buddy asked:

If this gains steam and I mean 1,000 to 3,000 point down days – we’ll see where that great depth of market HFT industry ends up……….

Yeah, between that and the big derivatives problem for the Big German Bank that no one is talking about (low visibility  at this point) the most likely course for the Fed would be to take pricing of a rate hike out of the equation. 

Still, Landry’s S&P 1,812-1,820 spot sounds good to me.

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Oh, oh…going to DreamOver land now.  Special corner of the World of Woo-Woo.

If you’re a new reader, DreamOver is a novel I have written and which I will be touching up this week to get it off to my lifelong buddy who is a seriously excellent proof reader.  And then it will get published perhaps on Amazon (though I am still waiting to head from a couple of publishing agents…).  Not exactly a line at the door yet, haha.

So what does the book have to do with the dream I had this morning and how does that relate to climate change?

Therein lies an interesting tale.

The book is about the problems the arise for a branch of the U.S. military when an officer doing secret personal surveillance work has his “consciousness entered” by a retired investor.  The investor, in turn, goes to a psychiatrist and learns that there has been a tremendous skills swap going on in addition to the basic dream content.  And the “skills swap in dreams” turns out to be a two-way street…

More on the book, later.  The main concept of the book is a phenomena called “Dreaming Over.”    Entering the lives of others in a dream state.  Not to control, but just to learn something of their future.

The book is partly based on my own paranormal experiences;  mainly precognitive communications/experience. 

Some of the dreams are very near time-wise, such at the dream about the oil rig platform in the Gulf of Mexico (18 hours lead time) , while others are more personal like knowing my youngest daughter had a medical operation even though I was hundreds of miles distant and not around telephones.  In that dream, she was wrapped in a green flag with a black spot on it.  Later turned out to be the surgical sheet.

Or that Arizona precog dream about a  road closure and detour while on a driving trip – 2-3 hours in advance.  See the column “Serious, Personal, WoWW March 13, 2014.”

So fast forward to the jump this morning.

I am viewing through male eyes and  the dream takes place in a big city.  A conference on climate was just winding up.  It was it a campus/university/big hotel kind of place.  The Dream View Port (VDP) was a conference participant in the government/academic space. 

The viewer in the dream went to a morning session was about to check out of the hotel and was being chastised for the lack of real progress at the conference.  The conference wrapped on a Friday.

There was also the image of people speaking in different languages.  Not only that, but there had also been a LOT of partying going on at the conference.  Apparently the people at the conference were all operating in two modes:  In one mode, they were all putting on airs as though they were dedicated worker types.  But there was this party mode thing as most of the people at the conference were in the 20-35 age group.

There was a poker game or some kind of gambling that some conference people went to the previous night.  Others partied, and a few stayed in working on conference related work.

Flip to the Friday morning session:  One male figure was short (5’8” or under), had a dark beard and mustache, hair combed back, and he had a very serious – almost fiery look – to his eyes. 

He was mad – or even furious – since he believed he had the most salient points – a paper or some presentation he wanted to do at the conference.  But he wasn’t given time to present and discuss his work.

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Friday Board of Directors meeting.  You’re in.

If you remember, your punishment for reading this column is volunteering to serve (free)  on my purely advisory BoD when I run up against a real stumper.

So let me wheel in the white board, sniff up on the market, light off a second cup and put on my presentation to “the Bored.”

No, we are not THAT worried about EMP yet, but the wording Electric Skies in Thursday’s column got a number of readers thinking in that direction again.  And amongst those readers was Joyce:

Reading Electric Skies reminds me of Nostradamus’ Century 6, Quatrain 97 that mentions “the sky will burn at 45 degrees” and “immediately scattered flame leaps up.” I used to wonder how the sky could burn, but now I think it means an EMP. NYC is the supposed target city. “Scattered flame” makes me think of lightning or meteor scatter.

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You’d be an idiot to use this morning’s drop at the open to claim victory for the doom and loon crowd.

But then again, no shortage of doomers on the net trying to cash in and make a buck on the same quirk of human nature that will back a freeway up for 20-miles over a fender-bender.

Yeah, that’s right:  lookers and gawkers, loose-lip talker and doom stalkers all have this quirk and it’s part of the programming of Americans who watch too much television, have allowed high information density to substitute for clear thinking, and all the rest.

If you’re not spending at least two hours a day, completely media-free, you are snagged in their great psychological experiment as an unwitting victim.  Turn off the noise.  Center.  Think.  Quiet the mind.

That said, yes the market may decline from sometime late this month to after the September Fed meeting, but the reason for the drop-kick out of the bucket this morning will comes down to two simple economic realities.

1.  The Calendar

You no doubt have already bookmarked the Options Clearing website’s calendar over here, but in case not, it explains a lot of market monkey-motion.

Go ahead, take a look:  Today is index option expiration and tomorrow will be equities option expiration.

Now, suppose you are a big trader and need a little summer scratch to rent a joint in The Hamptons for a couple of weeks.  You know – like that little $100,000 for two week rental that the mindless wiper got.  How would you go about it?

Well, you would collapse index options as far as you could (say down 100-150 on the Dow, or more) today.

Then, tomorrow, when you actually need to deliver the equities (in the index) you would run things back up, pocket the spread, and maybe go up to the park at Montauk as long as you’re that close, anyway.

So much for reality #1.  It’s note quite that simple (more people are involved, but that’s how the mechanics distill down in simplified terms, the only kind I can deal with at this god-awful hour.

2.  Doomsayers have large market shares.

Being a realist, and working both sides of the street , doesn’t make anyone a pile of money (except they do OK in their own accounts).  But the doomsayers do really well, though most of them make more money scaring subscriptions out of people than they make trading.

Still, here are two reality checks that I use to get a sense of where markets are.

The first is a chart of the gold ETF GLD compared with the S&P 500.  As you can see by the chart, either a) gold has more downside ahead or b) the S&P could rise a fair bit.

Second is the price of Bitcoins is back down to $235 this morning and I have yet to read any doomster apologizing for poor advice when they were screaming “to the moon” for Bitcoins when they were at $800.  I will match my February 2014 analysis of Bitcoin (and the follow-on in September of last year where I explained “demand crumple”) with any of the Bitcoin hype that was wasted your personal bandwidth.

Sure, the doom promoters will tell you how Bitcoing ATMs are going into Greece.  It’s all true. 

But how many of them will tell you (as Paul Harvey used to say) The Rest of the Story?

The rest is that Greeks (with an Onassis exception or two) aren’t particularly good at finance.  The Greeks have just been scammed out of owning their own central bank by the megalomaniacs of the ECB for a paltry $10-billion and some paper.  A country dumb enough to sell its financial autonomy down the road that cheap will put in anything including Pachinko machines, if it will put a meal on the table.

The deal for the ECB is roll-ups of central banks and if this means bringing in hordes of Muslim immigrants from Africa to pad and distract, well, WTF?  Right.  Jeez people are blind.

When I tell you that “End of the World” is not coming until the end of 2016 at the very earliest and more likely 2017 mid year more likely, I am deadly serious.

A long-time reader who’s a  real deal fixed income trader sent me a note yesterday explaining in some detail how I might be wrong on the Fed raising in September and how QE4 could be the real plan instead.

Bingo!  I love smart readers!

But later on this morning (when I acknowledge he’s right and the bonds do tend to lead and the TNX ain’t exactly heading skyward yet, which does hint more toward QE-4) the trading fact of the matter is that QE4 or Hike (sounds like a football huddle, doesn’t it?) we hard core realists will likely skin a few more shekels from the doom-screamers.

I should be thanking them, I ‘spose.

Oh, they might be right.  As asteroid could land in the Pacific in the next 2 1/2 minutes and we get a global coastal event, and the brightly colored charts may become real, but in my work, there is a semi-cyclical pulse to the market that we don’t talk about outside of Peoplenomics.com very often.

So while we expect the Big German Bank Blowup to be a major story at the end of 2016, the end of the world seems more likely after we complete an irregular high flat IV and finish super cycle V up.   

That final up thrust may turn out to be a truncated V…but the doomers who pointed out x-teen Hindenburg Omens wrong and have failed to mention the Baltic Dry Index is holding over 1,000 may be guilty of cherry-picking the bad news in order to sell something.  We don’t do that.

Singular aberrations is not what matters in markets like this.  What matters most is the holistic approach.  And I’ve been in cash now for what, seven weeks, is it? It’s all about the numbers and the preponderance of those those, not a cherry-picked number of the day. I get one for scare-mail from a ‘former CIA analyst” and I’m gonna puke.

Come 2016 (late) or 2017 and maybe as late as 2018, if you want to come view the dust bunnies under the bed, the rest of us who try get things right ahead of time will see if there’s room for you.

Dow futures are down 125 but like I said, the deal today is options, and if we bounce tomorrow (or a bigger drop, depending on how commercials play it) then gee, don’t look surprised.

The facts of the day are simple as ever:

• The Democrats not longer have a leading candidate, not when SHE ain’t fessing up on the emails and phones and is off at a $50,000/week vacation home.  Of the people my butt.  Aristos at play.

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Every morning on the long commute to work (either 23-feet to our “soft room” or the big 135’ commute to the office) I begin with a question that goes something like this:

If I clear my mind, what is the pattern or “thing” that will fall out of my computer that seems like a meme du jour?

This morning the oddly threaded world is talking about electric skies at some volume.

The first item was a story about the Google data center in Belgium that was impacted now by one or two lighting strikes, but four of them.

That struck me as curious:  Lightning doesn’t usually happen that often in close proximity to a single geographical point…except during the most severe of storms.

Then the i-Ching Inbox fired off. 

No, it’s not a piece of software (several readers have asked):  It’s just that when something is going around as a “strong vibe” through the world, the Inbox for email usually tosses in its two cents worth.

Sure enough…

My buddy Gaye of www.backdoorsurvival.com (who has been doing nifty articles featuring water planning for emergencies, like this one) reported that not only was her internet connection down Sunday, but the ham radios were acting up.

OK, we schedule a remedial Skype training session with her for today or tomorrow.  But that’s only the start.

The next i-Ching Inbox note deal is from my oak leaf cluster source warhammer who isd also somehow in the “electric skies” moment:

Here’s a new take on an old topic – I love the common sense that oozes out of this commentary by the Washington Post’s James Woolsy and Peter Pry:

<http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2015/aug/18/jams-woolsey-peter-pry-emp-a-shariah-approved-nucl/>

In the game of nukes, it only takes one – and one EMP detonation over east or central North America would expose the U.S. to many other strategic  and just plain survival threats.

The H.E.M.P.

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The return of the doomsters has netted me a fair about of personal criticism around the net, for reasons which are perfectly understandable.  There are so many so-called “experts” out there calling for a hard collapse, one reader put it this way:

Someone somewhere is gonna look very silly come this Oct 1st if the bond market doesn’t crash or the stock marker is going strong

If you read my more serious work on the www.peoplenomics.com site, you will know that

a) I think there is an even-money chance we are in an irregular high flight IV and that

b) the market could still have a major upward move left into the 2017 period. 

I might be a damn fool for thinking this, but as I read it, the market history supports this view. 

When I read headlines about how the “Central Banks are losing control…” I smile because that shows the lack of understanding people have of CB’s.  They specifically do NOT lose control.  They always have multiple levers to pull, not the least of which is another QE (4 is it?).  And they are also able to raise raises.

The good news about bond market predictions,  from the charlatan perspective,  is most people don’t demand they write clearly when making bond market predictions.

Allow me to explain:  If I were to jump onboard the band wagon and were to say “Bond Crash Coming In October” – what would you think would be the correct interpretation of such an event, even IF it were to be true? 

The reason such a prediction is intellectually dishonest is that a bond crash could be: (You get to pick one:)

A.  A large drop in bond yields (in other words the amount of interest paid).  Let’s take a 10-year treasury and pretend it’s paying 2.15% now.  If it goes to 1.9% some of the charlatan s would be able to say “There…you see bonds crashed.”

B.  On the other hand, if (as I expect) the Fed meeting in September sees a rate increase, then we might see bonds go to 2.65%.  Here’s the trick of the charlatans:  When  the interest rate goes up, the net present value of the bond declines.  (Go read up on Net Present Values or NPV here,)

Thus, the net present value of a 10 year bond will vary – depending on rate expectations. 

If you have a 2% yield bond and inflation expectations over the next 10 years jump to some astronomical level (10% per year, say) then your NPV of a 2% yield bond will collapse.  But, if you have a 5% yield bond, your NPV (which would be above par value (e.g.

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My personal “idea operating temp” varies a few degrees, depending on the kind of work being done.

For most consulting, writing, study, and thinking 68F  is about right.  Provided there’s a long-sleeved shirt.  Otherwise, 72F is acceptable.

Real construction (framing, hanging sheetrock, roofing, decking, and such is best done around 55-65F,

Gardening is best done at 75, or lower.  50F is a good temp for soil-breaking with a front-tine tiller, but up to 60F with the rear-tine variety that won’t smash you to smithereens.

Point is, I like comfort when working and this summer I have been very good about NOT doing much outside until the past week.

Elaine was playing with the cat, or some-such – and noticed some rot on a deck I’d built 8 or 9 years back, so this weekend was spent tearing off the rotten (and even remotely suspicious parts.  The good news about the deck was that it all went together with 3” construction screws and the special screws for treated decking were used.  So it was disassembly rather than blasting caps.

Later on this week, the repair wood will be delivered.  The decking itself will be #1 20-foot treated 2 by 6s.  These cost a fortune, but like a boat, if a deck isn’t maintained, rot is just a fact of life.

The heat’s been the main thing, though.  Not the work.

I do fine up until about 85F but by then, the glasses start coming off at impossibly bad moments.  Most of the past week, that working temp threshold has been sailing by at about 10 AM, or so.  Sunday was typical:  Start working at 6 AM and call it quits about 10:15 and hit the shower.

East Texas temps, despite what the climate alarmists may say, had a pretty typical “hot part” to summer this year.  A handful of days over 100 but mostly just bumping up against 98 or 99 and enough humidity to be sticky.  Not like out in the Phoenix area.

Thursday of this week should be special:  It may not even bust 90.

Around the country, one of the most interesting weather stories comes from the Alaska Dispatch News which noted a couple of weeks back:

As of Wednesday, Anchorage had seen 32 days this season with official temperatures 70 degrees and higher, putting this season fourth in the number of 70-degree-and-warmer days since recordkeeping began in April 1952.

That doesn’t sound like the climate-driven end of the world, somehow.  Still, credit where due:  It has been hot (*or what passes for hot to weather wimps) in San Francisco.  And even Phoenix tied an old high record over the weekend.  117F is warm, I don’t care who you area.

Still, there are cool spots, too.  Like Bangor Maine where they just had the chilliest July ever along with coldest year-to-date

Then there was a super cold front that brought temps in Idaho down within spitting range of freezing.

I mention all of this to underscores that many of the records are falling 11 or 12 years after old ones.. And this leads Ures truly to wonder aloud if the El Nino/La Nina cycle is hyperextending?

It might be interesting to watch the scientific press once the information gets collected.

But the calendar is what matters most now:  Historically, the odds of busting 100 are going down by the day.  And when we get back from our Peoplenomics.com cruise, in mid September, we may be down to reasonable outdoor working weather, again.

Elaine’s Articulation Award

She said something I never heard before, but then again, I suffer from male pattern deafness.  I just can’t seem to hear certain phrases  like “don’t let the cat….” or another one is “Take the….”

The reason for the award is she said – as I was offering to double the size of the deck that needs rework – “Don’t make the house any bigger – it’s too much to take care of now…”

Huh?   Well, as you can imagined, this was a terrible shock.  I could have sworn that women (*and men) both liked big houses.  Maybe once upon a time, but that’s done.

When we first moved here, the original square footage of the place was 1568 for the house  and 220 square feet of deck.  The shop space was 12 X 24.  The rest was an open RV cover pole building.

So I sat back and run out the numbers.  The house is only a little bigger at 1,833.

The decks have grown, too: 484 square feet.

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