When it comes to indicators, it's a mixed bag.
The stock market as nearly everyone knows has been on a tear so far this year, up 15% even with the recent downturn.Will it continue or is a nasty correction or even perhaps a bear market just around the economic bend.
Markets supposedly climb a worry wall. Some indicators are getting better like manufacturing and the trade deficit. If last week was any indication, investors might want to check for weakening signs.
Indicators, though highly fallible, come in all types--advance-declines, new highs-new lows, market breath, to name a few. Momentum is another well-watched indicator.
One such is the RSI or relative strength index. Simply put, it measures size and strength on days when stocks go up. Though it is considered a technical indicator, it has a sentiment component--that is, what and how people are feeling about the market.
The National Association of Home Builders survey hit the airways last week shedding some so-called good light on an otherwise gloomy scene.
But there may be--and we stress may be--more diluting its value as an indicator than just the general fear about the Federal Reserve diluting the contents of its punch bowl.
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If you hang around medicine awhile you'll get a pretty good idea about printed forms.
But medicine isn't alone in its printed-form misery. Today it's everywhere.
After serving in the military and working for a time at the Veteran's Administration, it became Oh-Holy-Night-Clear that somewhere in the dank, dark entrails of DC there had to be a Department of Memoranda with one and only one purpose: Germinate more memoranda.
A reviling thought indeed but nevertheless, like your wife's mother coming for the holidays, your worst nightmare.
Memoranda and printed forms are the Siamese twins of the written word. Like Watson and Crick, Tinkers to Evers to Chance, Curley, Moe and Larry these two are inseparable.
Here's an excellent description of the printer-form miasma engulfing modern mankind and how those lovable legal legends of progress push their fare.
http://www.dailyspeculations.com/wordpress/?p=8586
We touched on this in our Rights Are Rights Until They Aren't article.
Here's one more view about the changing news-journalism landscape. Agreeing or disagreeing isn't the point. It's more about life's only constant--change. Prepare for it.
http://www.linkedin.com/today/post/article/20130814183645-143695135-bezos-heraclitus-and-the-hybrid-future-of-journalism?_mSplash=1
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MORE ON TAPERING
So what's the most important indicator that predicts when the Fed will cut back on a QE program that may go down in history as infamous when all is said and finished? Your guess is most likely as good as Bernanke's.
Playing around with knobs can be as dangerous as leaving a three year old unattended out by the family swimming pool. Anything can happen.
http://www.marctomarket.com/2013/08/take-aways-from-us-data-dump.html
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Religion around our house wasn't discussed often.
But whenever it was my father usually prevailed. My mother was born and reared a catholic, though through her middle years she strayed into other non-catholic denominations only to return to her Catholicism a few years before her death.
My dad? Who knew, though he claimed membership in one well-known Protestant sect. His rule centered on letting my older brother and me grow up absent any indoctrination to decide for ourselves. And that's what we did as far as I can tell.
The priests at my mother's local parish didn't like the idea and they didn't give up either, especially after my father died leaving my mother with two young boys to raise alone. If today's young single, divorced or widowed mothers think they have few rights, they haven't studied much history. But we'll leave that for another time.
What's significant here is learning to decide for yourself. It's a right you never want to forfeit. And yet, ironically, it's a right more under siege today than ever.
Fair and balanced and much of that other BS, left or right, like all the news fit to spin, notwithstanding, today much of the real truth lay way outside MSM. It's a miraculously fast, exciting and dangerous era.
Once upon a time three major networks controlled the bulk of news. Through the lens of hindsight that too was a miraculously fast, exciting and extremely dangerous era
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Conspiracy theorists often run amok. But so too do their antagonists.
Neutralizing your opponents is an age-old ploy. Threatening another person's livelihood brings out either the best or the worst. If the skin of central bankers were any thinner it would be on a roll of that tissue paper we recently wrote about, Desheeting.
For want of a better term-- and we certainly need one--we'll assume our readers are among the most mature and can decide for the themselves. So here is more on gold.
http://www.resourceinvestor.com/2013/08/13/gold-the-hidden-agenda-behind-the-bear-raid?eNL=520a79a2fc746f340c000010&utm_source=DailyENL&utm_medium=eNL&utm_campaign=RI_eNL&_LID=485386&t=precious-metals&page=2
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Look at a gold chart and you'll note the precious metal practically everyone loves to belittle and avoid today made a double bottom around 1,200 an ounce back in June-July.
Since then it's staged a slightly better than 10% rally to close recently around the 1,334 level. Prices in the past week, according to today's WSJ, are up 4%. So what's it all about, Alphie, when you sort it out?
One word: China.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323446404579008372464837550.html?mod=ITP_moneyandinvesting_2
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Let's see a show of hands is a primitive way to take a survey.
But it has its usefulness. Who wants to be or likes being controlled? Let me see a show hands. Recently, there was a big blackout when CBS and their cable company couldn't agree on, what else, money.
CBS wanted more, Time-Warner their customer didn't want to pay it. So as in most such cases the middle man--Joe and Jill Consumer--get screwed. Moral: if you want to avoid the hand raising surveys when it comes television fare, read this.
http://www.moneytalksnews.com/2013/08/13/ask-stacy-whats-the-best-internet-provider/?utm_source=newsletter&utm_campaign=email-2013-08-13&utm_medium=email
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Back to school may not mean back to shopping, according to recent data on retail stores.
Despite this administration's attempts to put a glow on assumed economic recovery numbers, mom and poppers might not be buying it.
http://www.testosteronepit.com/home/2013/8/12/even-deep-discounts-at-these-stores-couldnt-lure-customers-i.html
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At some point all the tapering fears from all the tapering talk will get priced into the market if it isn't nearly already.
That surely doesn't rule out a nasty correction. Nasty corrections depend more on one's definition of nasty than percentages. In a world of druthers most investors would opt for no corrections.
But that would be like opting for no Central Banks: unrealistic. Screw-ups happen. They're a part of life.
So you might want to put on your counter intuitive cap as the tapering fears mount.
http://blogs.marketwatch.com/thetell/2013/08/13/end-of-qe-could-mean-liftoff-for-stocks-wells-capital/
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