The past two months have been tough on the precious metals sector. We saw precious metals lead the market higher all of last year until December 2009 when prices plummeted as the US Dollar started to bounce. The continued rise in stocks indicated an extreme overbought condition and alerted us that a sharp pullback was going to take place. Many traders...

Courtesy of  Highchartpatterns We went through a lot of charts tonight and saw a nice pattern in the commodity charts. We’re not quite there yet but we have very nice support coming up in all the following charts: Note how the 200 SMA/ base are coming together. All it would take is 1-2 days more sell-off and we’ll hit these spots. Until...

Here is an OpEd in the NY Times from Paul Volcker: How to Reform Our Financial System The further proposal set out by the president recently to limit the proprietary activities of banks approaches the problem from a complementary direction. The point of departure is that adding further layers of risk to the inherent risks of essential commercial bank...

Courtesy of Henry Blodget at The Business Insider/Clusterstock These two charts tell you pretty much all you need to know about the state of the US economy.  They also, unfortunately, provide some clues as to how this movie will end. First, from John Mauldin, the state of the U.S. government’s finances.  The red line is spending.  The blue line...

CalculatedRisk Quote of the day … “”What we see in the United States and some other economies is a statistical recovery and a human recession.” Larry Summers, Davos, Jan 30, 2009 (via CNBC) Click on graph for larger image in new winder. This graph shows the job losses from the start of the employment recession, in percentage...

Fallond Stock Picks They held on for a few days but it was worrying bulls were unable to mount a challenge to the 50-day MAs, let alone the 20-day MAs. Volume climbed to register a confirmed distribution day. The possibility now is for some form of measured move down; for example, the Nasdaq could drop to 2,100 before bouncing.

IQS Brief – The New January Effect

MISH 4th quarter GDP came in at 5.7%. Discounting revisions (and probably even counting them), that was the last hurrah. Here is the story from two highly respected analysts. Dave Rosenberg: The Houdini Recovery First, the report was dominated by a huge inventory adjustment — not the onset of a new inventory cycle, but a transitory realignment of...

Like the market in general the QQQQ’s felt VERY heavy last week and confirmed with a resolution to the downside. It currently broke support on huge volume – best to sit out in cash and wait till charts set back up! FREE QQQQ Trading Report Here

I thought I would put this more detailed report on finding and trading low risk setups for gold, silver, oil indexes etc…. In short it does not matter what time frame you trade with or if you trade exchange traded funds, futures contracts or CFD’s (contract of difference). This type of trading setup works for virtually every investment but I mainly...

Scott Redler of T3Live Today I went on Street Signs talking about the complexion change in the market. Below is a video from that segment, as well as my preparatory notes. This month we started to watch for a composure change—look for technical signs to add up for a change in market complexion. It first started when GOOD EARNINGS were sold—JP...

Zero Hedge Following the crowd, and going long the Brazilian Real while shorting the Yen has had some disastrous results for carry traders: starting off 2010 with a 9.2% loss is never a good thing to show your boss. (chart courtesy of Macro Man via CreditTrader) In the mean time the dollar is back to August 2009 levels. At what point will the carry’ers...

Vincent Fernando of Money Game There’s been a massive technical breakdown for emerging markets according to Barron’s Getting Technical blog. Indices for Brazil, Russia, India, and China have all nose-dived in the last few weeks. China’s reversal has been one the ugliest, but in general all emerging markets have slammed. Barron’s:...

Brandon Rowley of T3Live The S&P 500 has traded in a rising channel for about 6 months being bought on the low end and sold on the high end. Channels are some of my favorite technical patterns because they’re very basic and give traders an idea of how to approach trading from a general strategic perspective. My view is that markets and stocks...