by Karl Denninger This is amusing to wake up to on a Monday morning…. The strengthening U.S. economy is proving no deterrent to the biggest rally in Treasuries since 2008, and America’s largest bank says it may get even better for bond investors. Uh huh.  It’s called “fear” and it’s been driving money into the US and, specifically, into Treasuries.  It’s ra Read More...

Submitted by Tyler Durden Via Peter Tchir, of TF Market Advisors, Maybe, but not in the way everyone seems to think.  Haven’t we already decoupled? YTD stock returns in the US are 0% for the S&P and Nasdaq, and the Buffet owned DJIA is actually up 5%. Get your FREE GOLD Weekly Report sponsored by NYSE YTD Performance (rebased to USD) for major global equity indices. The Dow is flat t Read More...

Courtesy of Jesse’s Cafe Americain  Janet Tavakoli does her usual great job of cutting to the heart of the matter. Below is an excerpt of her Huffington Post piece on MF Global today. I keep thinking that nothing will shock me anymore in this US financial fraud fest. But the coverup of the MF Global stealing of customer money in a cloud of legal doubletalk, supposedly the one pristine and unt Read More...

Submitted by Tyler Durden In his latest weekly chartology, Goldman’s David Kostin takes a different route to recapping the week’s events and instead of merely summarizing the market action, explains what the views of Goldman’s clients are, especially the bulls among them (“Bullish investors hold more positive outlooks for margins and Europe, and argue that our target is to Read More...

Experienced traders recognize that volume typically dries up going into the holiday season. Light volume and the holiday seasonality generally push equity prices higher. The discussion of whether Santa Claus comes to Wall Street has arrived in earnest. I do not envy Santa as he has the most arduous task of determining if Wall Street was naughty or nice. I suppose it depends on whether he reviews r Read More...

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By Jeff Clark, Casey Research If you’re bullish about the long term for gold and silver, it’s mouthwatering to watch them undergo a major correction after taking earlier profits that added to your deployable cash. For a little historical perspective on pullbacks, consider the following charts. The current 15.6% gold decline, while considered a “major” correction, is not Read More...

Hello traders everywhere!  Adam Hewison here, co-founder of MarketClub with your mid-day market update for Friday, the 9th of December. Stocks in the News DuPont Co., the most valuable US chemical maker, cut its 2011 earnings forecast by 10 cents. We analyze this stock for you today. Euro up, Euro down Today, we will take a close look at the euro and see if you should be long or short this curre Read More...

By Elliott Wave International Is the bank really the safest place to keep your money? Robert Prechter joins the Mind of Money host Douglass Lodmell to discuss what backs bank deposits and how you can keep your hard-earned money safe. We invite you to watch the interview below. Then read Robert Prechter’s free report, Discover the Top 100 Safest U.S. Banks.     What is the Read More...

Submitted by Tyler Durden Yay verily, Michigan Consumer Confidence jumped more than expected and there was rejoicing all around. Of course, a simple scratch beneath the surface reveals what many realists suspect, expectations for the future are the major driver of the headline number. Unfortunately we have seen exactly this pattern before. Not only are the levels and changes similar to Q3/Q4 200 Read More...

How many European bankers does it take to change a light bulb? That’s a joke in search of an answer, but EWI’s European analyst Brian Whitmer explained five months ago that the “light bulb moment” was coming — that’s the time when most people would clearly recognize the severity of the European debt crisis. He offered this spot-on analysis back in July 2011, bef Read More...

Given the failure of the “RISK OFF” trade to develop any serious downside momentum this week, I am using the dip this morning to take a small profit on my S&P 500 ETF (SPY) puts. We had every reason to go down, given the Standard and Poor’s threatened European debt downgrade on Monday night. If this despised and deeply flawed ratings agency had made this announcement in September or Octo Read More...

Fallond Stock Picks Morning action had suggested 200-day MAs had finally proven to be a step too far for the indices, but a late day recovery placed the pressure back on these key moving averages. Certainly, there is strong indication 200-day MAs will be broken to the upside. The S&P found support at the back test of declining resistance turned support. Volume climbed to register an accumulati Read More...

Americans looking south of the Rio Grande tend to forget, if they ever knew, that Mexico is, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, now America’s second largest source of imports. Of the United States’ total crude oil imports averaging 9,033 thousand barrels per day (tbpd), Mexico is the second largest source of imports, at 1,319 tbpd, exceeded only by Canada with 2,6 Read More...

By Jeff Clark, Casey Research A young woman – let’s call her Andrea – inherited some money from her father in late 1997. She was only nineteen at the time. Not knowing the first thing about investing, she kept the money in stocks and bonds as her father had, wanting to hold on to it until she really needed it. She played it “safe.” She got married last year and so began to w Read More...