Replies to post #41962 on SPDR S&P 500 (SPY)

[Irongate]

"Every thread in the financial fabric is being stressed. It is only when a few threads break that we are forced to see the stress in adjacent threads. In fact, ALL the threads are coupled and affected by the weaknesses in all others. These guys have been getting away with murder, until now. An attempted fix here, an attempted fix there. Bush, Bernanke, Paulson, et al, right down to the guy most profiting from shorting the collapse, recognize the implications of a general collapse, and are working to try to prevent it. Timing is important, and this week, time ran out. I shook my head today, as I watched the major cyborgs begin the nibbling process, driving the indices toward the basement. The real nosedive began at 1500 HR, and that's the time that I believe Ben had to make a decision to play a trump card. The nature of the announcement, more of a HINT OF GOOD NEWS, came earlier than Ben would have liked, but, disaster was in the making. The announcement was rather another validation of Stan Freeberg's famous "Why radio is better the television." The power is in the ability of the mind to create more vivid images than the eye sees. "No details until next week. Just use your imagination." This was the giant sundae, topped with tons of whipped cream, onto which a bomber just dropped a giant maraschino cherry! And to ensure the outcome, Ben unleashed the PPT, but big time. Splash!

Yes, short sellers, who began to build positions during the day, got caught flat footed. The footprints of their scramble to get out are there on the intraday charts. And, analysts who began writing commentary before the close, had to rethink and rewrite extensively. Was this "a REAL rally?" No, the participation in terms of volumes was still at the 1-year average. It primarily was another cannibal dance, a computer video game, where outlooks and tactics had to be quickly revised. As I said, I think that Ben and his minions are on the job, and now imaginations must, for some short time at least, take over. That bodes bullish, at least for the beginning of next week. Just remember, Ben, attention spans are short."

- Charlie Miller, MIT Retired

[*~1Best~*]

The picture looks the same as gold hypers is another breed of bear type. Doesn't he know that the WS makes money both long/short. If he is so accurate, he would have made enough money so he does not need to sell seats to listen to hidden pivot seminar.

http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.asp?message_id=27057814

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The most violent short-squeeze we’ve witnessed in well more than a week transformed an ugly and despondent stock market on Friday into the proverbial lipsticked pig, but don’t expect the little oinker to fly much higher when stocks start to trade again. The rally occurred with such unexpected swiftness and so late in the day that even the Wall Street Journal’s market wrap-up lagged well behind the excitement and its apparent cause. A half hour after the NYSE closed, and nearly an hour after the blitzkrieg rally began, the Journal’s Peter McKay was still reporting, “Wary Mood Pressures Stocks.”

In fact, it was the un-wariest mood imaginable that had turned stocks maniacally higher, prompted by a “report” that there were “hopes” for a bailout of bond insurer Ambac Financial Group. We enclose these words in quotes because, an hour after the NYSE closed, it was still unclear where the news had come from. Columnist McKay referred in his lead to “hopes for a bailout,” and to “word of a possible deal to bail out the troubled bond insurer” in the next sentence, but he made no further mention of the story/rumor or its source.

Thimble-Riggers

Even so, there can be little doubt that it was put into play by some of the most capable arse bandits on the Street, timed as it was to hit in the final half-hour of the trading week. The fact that it could not be sourced immediately by The Wall Street Journal further suggests that the story was a plant, and a spectacularly effective one at that. To put the reaction to it in perspective, if you had bought just ten S&P futures contracts at 3:20 p.m. (EST), just before the rally took off, you would have made about $75,000 in a little less than thirty minutes.

Not that we think the thimble-riggers who sprang this heist were shooting so low. No sirree, if we were sleuthing around in the time-and-sale records of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, we’d be absolutely flabbergasted if we failed to turn up some shadowy operator who had quietly accumulated at least a thousand contracts ahead of the quote-unquote news. Let’s do the math: At $7,500 in nearly instant profits per contract, that would amount to a quick $7.5 million. That may be small potatoes in the Merc pits, but not so small that the dupes who sold ahead of the rally, and who effectively gave up that $7.5 million, would not try to track down the perpetrators. (Here’s an offer: If you’re one of those who got fleeced, click here and I’ll put you in touch with my old partner-in-crime-solving, Kyle Rimdahl, the storied San Francisco private eye at Lipset Service.)

Ambac’s Re-Rescue

We should also point out that this was not the first time stocks have gotten some hefty unearned mileage from Ambac’s recurring rescue story. Recall that, a couple of weeks ago, Warren Buffett made an offer to take Ambac and two other insurance biggies out of their headaches by buying up the least risky tranches of their portfolios. They turned him down, but not before stocks had reversed 500 points at the mere prospect of a white knight.

Not that anyone other than Kudlow and a few other CNBC shills actually believes that a supposed “bailout” of Ambac is going to save the world. Trouble in the mortgage markets has already metastasized so completely that moral hazard has spread to the entire universe of credit instruments -- even to your supposedly perfectly safe money market fund. Concerning Friday’s knee-jerk reaction to shadowy news of yet another huge bailout (assuming such a thing were even possible in so fearfully skeptical an environment), it is not believers who cause such short-squeezes as we just saw, but rather, panicky shorts who know full well that the nose-pickers in the trading pits will not long ponder whether the Ambac news is genuinely “good” before leaping wildly to buy stocks.

The Buffett rally detumesced quickly when reality reasserted itself the next day, and this rally will too. At least it will have given the pundits and shills another opportunity to make fools of themselves, even if their mindlessly conjectural optimism is completely forgotten in a few days.

***

Seats Are Going Fast

The 12 seats I’d allotted for the March 8-9 Hidden Pivot seminar are beginning to fill up. If you’d like to attend this online event, click here for further details and instructions on how to register. The class will be held on Saturday/Sunday from 9:00 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. Mountain Time. If you want to learn how to forecast stocks and commodities as confidently and precisely as top pros, this is an opportunity you should not pass up. http://news.goldseek.com/RickAckerman/1203836400.php