I'll start the week with this nice cartoon:



Source: http://www.theburningplatform.com/2013/10/20/sunday-funnies-61/

Pardon my language here, but all the announcers on financial TV look positively orgasmic with all these new daily all-time highs. They really look 'excited'.

This is the kind of thing I've been trying to explain forever. Few, if any, see it. If we don't change, change will be foisted upon us. The longer we wait, the worse it will be. I expect few will change, and so when we are forced to change, it will be 'biblical' in scope. That is in zero ways a religious reference, I just used the term to emphasize how significant I think this is going to be. I probably should have used 'historic'.

http://market-ticker.org/akcs-www?post=225292

It's just getting insane. And the talking heads on TV are constantly saying how great Europe is now for investing. Super-undervalued. Problems solved. Uh-huh.

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2013-10-22/you-wont-believe-what-french-are-taxing-now

Look at the one graphic. Nope, no inflation. We need more. Look at that CPI line.

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2013-10-22/kimberly-clark-contains-leaks-while-hiding-inflation-diaper-trim

Yep, the new normal.

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2013-10-22/tuesday-humor-new-normal-fundamental-analysis

I tried to just post the image, but this #%&ing software found a 'bad word' in the image tag and wouldn't allow it. So I guess if your address has any bad word in any form inside other words it won't allow it. That's taking censorship waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay too far for me. Welcome to the new order. Let me try an experiment here: let's see if this won't show: cockadoodledoo. Wheeeeeeeeeeee, I beat the system, it didn't see that horrible, bad word I hid in there.

P.S. This is not a slam against the forum owner, only the forum software company that wrote the software this runs on.

Okay, what do you call this?

You have $100 (or $100,000). $50 gets stolen, then you get sucked into a bet you think is a no-brainer, for $50, and without, of course, realizing it, against whoever it was that originally stole your $50 in the first place. You lose, and have nothing, and 'they' have your entire $100.

Give up? The stock market/Fed/big banks complex.

Do I really have to explain it?

They drive the market down (let's say we come in here, but the cycle repeats forever, bigger and bigger each time), and you panic sell. They steal half your money (for example) via currency devaluation i.e. phony money printing. They use this to gun the market up. They, of course, loaded up at the bottom. 'They' knew where the bottom was, because they created it, with your money. Now, as the time for a top approaches, they suck you in with lots of media BS about how undervalued the market is, and how great companies are doing.

You take the half of your money that's left, buy in, and the top is in. They are the ones selling to you, short (once they finish their distributing). They crush it down (easy to do, just create a phony 'black swan' event, which is the market's version of a false flag attack), and you finally panic out at the lows, where they use your selling to cover their shorts, and buy in. Lather, rinse, repeat. This whole process, essentially, was even written about on the 20's in Reminiscences of a Stock Operator. Nothing ever changes, except the efficiency of the screwing.

What's curious is that they play, in a sense, basically the same game intraday.

And, for a follow up, let's be fair and look at Friday. The market's be on fire, another new all-time high. How many did they have, for the entirety of My Pivots? 2,000? 4,000? No, twenty. But four were mine, so sixteen, really. Now, perhaps the three from today (excluding my one member) were also in yesterday. I can only see the last time they were in, that could make nineteen, at the most.

Just think about this right now. The market hit another all-time high. The bull is raging, one of the longest and strongest ever. Public involvement should be at a maximum. I doubt many in here have been to BigCharts.com. It was a quickly program I used to look up a chart when all my charting programs were closed out for the day and I wanted to quick check something. Nowadays probably most would use StockCharts.com for that. Anyway, at the peak of the dotbomb bubble, it was sold... for $80 million! That's what generally happens when there is a bull and the public is stock mad.

I recall when every last person I knew was a 'trader' in '99. My plumber literally quit his job of decades and went 'full-time' trading. My dentist, he was going full-time. My friend's doctor, he closed his practice. My dad's friend was up like $200K in AOL, and he had just bought a house for like that much (back when, and in a place, where that bought a lot) my dad told him 'I think you should sell the AOL, pay the house off fully, and be really happy with that deal.' He laughed and said it was going way higher, and he was going to be a multimillionaire. That was the top. He basically lost it all.

I remember a good buddy's sister, I think she was an engineer, she quit to 'trade' full-time. She took her life savings, and everything she could borrow. She went 'all in' on CREE. She was doing well with it. Pull up a chart. Mine is adjusted for splits, so I'm not sure what the actual high was, but that doesn't matter, it won't change the percentage drops and so on. So, at the peak in early 2000 it was over 100. At the low a few years later it was 8 and change. I asked him somewhere around there how she was doing. She was 'holding on', and said 'It will come back, they always do.' Good thing she didn't choose eToys or WebVan. Anyway, now fourteen years later, with all this Fed pumping, it still isn't back, and do you have any idea how much the buying power of those dollars has dropped since then? My calculations, based on my own personal CPI, is about 66%, I think it was, in the last five years. Imagine over those fourteen. So, even if she is still holding, and sells at break even, she really took a total reaming.

The point? That's what public involvement usually looks like at a bull top. I'm not arguing this means this 'bull' has a lot more to go, what I'm saying is, this market is broken. That kind of action can't happen. No one has the available credit for it. The 'public' is margined on the same order now as the 2000 and 2007 tops. They have no home ATM piggy bank, no savings left, no credit cards to run way up trading. And less than zero interest. In this way, this is not really a 'bull' market (hence my constant use of quotes every time), it's a cyclical 'bull' in a secular bear cycle, created solely with stolen and funny munny, while 'Rome burns'.

And, again, the point? All this is confirmed when one realizes a tremendously well-known, famous, popular place like My Pivots, on a day when the market hits another all time high, and pops in GOOG over 120-something dollars in a day (or equal or even higher percentage moves in the likes of CMG, NFLX et al) are not uncommon, generates a total of perhaps nineteen members to visit for the entire day. So, no wonder I have four visitors a day. Thinking of it another way, I have like 20% or 25% of the level of traffic (in terms of members) as one of the biggest and best forums out there, a forum with over 122,000 posts, has! That's great!