What would you say if I told you that gold is up on the year?  Yes that’s right, despite all the doom & gloom surrounding gold and the seemingly incessant bearish media coverage the yellow metal is actually up on the year – gold ended 2013 at $1204.80/oz and is now trading a little more than… Continue Reading

From Stock Trader’s Almanac: “Copper has a tendency to make a major seasonal bottom in December and then a tendency to post major seasonal peaks in April or May.” This is one of the strongest seasonal patterns in any market and it’s all the more interesting this year given that copper made a low of… Continue Reading

Renowned portfolio manager Jeffrey Gundlach of DoubleLine Funds gave his latest presentation on the state of the market this afternoon. Here are the key takeaways: Economist forecasts are always too optimistic with regard to growth and inflation Oil could continue falling in yet another sign that global economic growth is weak Bond yields have more risk… Continue Reading

Gold mining shares have been hit with just about everything imaginable during the past couple of months; lets recap some of the ‘bad news’: US economic data continues to impress with a blowout jobs report last week Large declines in commodities across the board The consensus is that the Fed will begin hiking rates next… Continue Reading

The decline in crude oil prices is putting the squeeze to many large oil producing nations such as Iran, Russia, and Venezuela. The Russian ruble and Russian equities are in free-fall and Venezuelan CDS (credit default swaps) are blowing out to levels not seen since the 2008 Global Financial Crisis: Click to enlarge Venezuela 5-year… Continue Reading

In the financial blogosphere, the cream rises to the top. JC Parets, Founder and President of Eagle Bay Capital, LLC, is one of the clearest voices on Wall Street today. As author of the popular technical analysis blog, All Star Charts, Parets, 30, has established a significant following (You may know him from CNBC and other frequent media appearances). We… Continue Reading

The CFTC Commitments of Traders data which came out yesterday showed a couple of surprising things: Speculators (both large and small) aggressively covered short positions while the commercials drastically reduced longs resulting in a significant drop in open interest. This behavior was likely due largely to Monday’s huge upside reversal following Sunday night’s commodity futures bloodbath… Continue Reading

With the gold price waffling near $1,200/ounce, close to the ‘fully loaded’ cost for many gold producers (Dundee’s definition of fully loaded cost = the sum of Total Cash Costs (incl. royalties) plus, cash G&A, exploration, cash taxes, cash interest and true sustaining capital costs), the #1 topic of conversation among gold mining investors & analysts are costs.… Continue Reading

After a relatively placid afternoon of oscillating in the $19.70-$19.90 range the #1 trading vehicle for gold producers, the GDX, experienced a ‘flash crash’ during the final minute of today’s trading session: Click to enlarge 5 million shares traded during the final minute of today’s session which included 1.25 million shares during a 2-second burst… Continue Reading

In the modern market environment (roughly the past decade) we have consistently seen volume spikes during sell-offs followed by volume trickling lower during steady uptrends. The recent price/volume action in the S&P 500 (SPY) is a perfect example of this phenomenon:   This recent trend is a marked shift from the days of Edwards &… Continue Reading

The Psy-Fi Blog has a must read post titled “The A to Z of Behavioral Biases”. Most of us have been guilty of harboring every single one of these biases at one point or another in our lives. The worst part is that many people aren’t even aware that they continue to exhibit behavioral biases which… Continue Reading

We have various contacts at major cruise lines and commodities trading desks. Most of the airlines and cruise lines are now fully hedged on their fuel costs through the end of 2016. Even Carnival Cruise Lines, which previously prided itself on not hedging much of its fuel costs, has taken advantage of the decline in… Continue Reading

The gold miners as represented by the GDX have seen some noteworthy technical developments recently: Despite the hugely bearish sentiment swing in the commodities complex, primarily due to Thursday’s OPEC meeting and the subsequent crash in crude oil, neither gold nor the miners made new lows Friday’s holiday shortened session had all the characteristics of a… Continue Reading

If the Sunday night futures market was to be given a movie title it would have been dubbed the “Commodity Catastrophe”; we saw WTI crude futures fall below $64/barrel, silver traded with a 14 handle ($14.43 low), and copper fell into the $2.70s. Thus far this morning we are witnessing a bevy of “V-bottoms” across… Continue Reading

Crude oil is undoubtedly the topic du jour, however, a disappointing Thanksgiving retail weekend may throw a wrench into those “cheaper gasoline is an economic stimulus” theories that have been circulating. Here is some of the thought provoking material we are reading this weekend: optionMONSTER – 2015 consensus earnings estimates are much too optimistic after the rout… Continue Reading