And your point is what? To how big a geographic area does the message of your link apply? Vancouver city only? To all of the Greater Vancouver Regional District, including the White Rock area? To all of British Columbia? Maybe even to Toronto? What does Augirl think of your link? I cannot quite grasp what you were getting at with your 21:55 link. Could you please explain some context for it, or at least explain the geographic area to which you think it applies. Thanks. Equiz.

http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSN3021119720100430

Separately, the CFTC fined Moore Capital Management — one of the largest and most consistently profitable hedge funds — for trying to manipulate the settlement prices of platinum and palladium futures contracts on the New York Mercantile Exchange.

The CFTC said Moore’s fund portfolio manager tried to manipulate platinum and palladium futures from at least November 2007 through May 2008 by entering trades in the last 10 seconds of trading in a manner designed to exert upward pressure on the settlement prices.

The practice is known as “banging the close.”

In addition to the fine, Moore Capital has restrictions on its trading activities for three years, including a two-year restriction on its trades within 15 minutes of and during the close in the platinum and palladium futures and options markets, the CFTC said.

Moore Capital said the individual involved in the settlement case left the company in the fall of 2008.

…Beauty

Morgan Stanley pays $14 million oil-trading fine

McClatchy Newspapers

WASHINGTON — In another black eye for Wall Street, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission late Thursday announced a $14 million fine against Morgan Stanley Capital Group Inc. to settle accusations of hiding its complex oil trades.

The settlement, in which Morgan Stanley did not admit or deny the accusations, comes as oil prices have continued their steady upwards march and have some oil analysts again saying that excessive speculation is again pushing up energy prices. One recent estimate put the cost of that to consumers and businesses at $300 billion annually.

In an announcement after U.S. markets had closed, the CFTC said that a trader from Morgan Stanley conspired on Feb. 6, 2009, with a counterpart from Swiss financial firm UBS Securities to hide from authorities a prohibited trading activity.

The CFTC said Morgan Stanley was on the other end of a deal with a client of UBS. Morgan Stanley was looking to buy more than 33,000 March-dated contracts for future delivery of oil and sell the same quantities of April contracts for oil. The two parties agreed to a deal in which they’d settle on a price after trading had finished for the day - something called a “trade at settlement” agreement.

The problem, said regulators, is that Morgan Stanley asked its unidentified business partner, the UBS client, not to disclose the special trade until after oil trading had settled that day. The law requires immediate notification to the New York Mercantile Exchange, where oil is traded.

In similar past cases, these sorts of charges by the CFTC have involved a practice called “banging the close.” That involves traders dumping large volumes of contracts right before the close of trading in an attempt to manipulate the settlement price. When large numbers of contracts are trading hands, a slight change in prices can net millions of dollars in ill-gotten gains.

The CFTC declined to comment on whether Morgan Stanley and its counterpart were trying to manipulate the closing price, or why such a steep fine was issued for a single violation. UBS was hit with a fine of just $200,000. The agency declined to tell McClatchy Newspapers whether the fine reflected a larger pattern of violation.

Although the $14 million settlement is small by the huge numbers now tossed around on Wall Street, the CFTC announcement adds to a public image problem for the nation’s biggest banks.

Morgan Stanley is active in the trading of contracts for the future delivery of oil, but it’s also very active on the unregulated “dark markets” where two private parties enter into huge bets on what happens to oil prices. And it’s also active in the physical market where oil actually changes hands.

Critics believe Wall Street speculation drives up oil prices by creating false impressions of tight supplies, and by using investor money, often from pension funds, to take buy-and-hold positions in oil contracts as if they were stocks to be held with the anticipation of price gains.

“We believe the current high oil prices are caused by speculation, not market fundamentals, as oil supply is more than adequate to satisfy current and future demand, which is expected to remain weak. However, we expect crude oil prices to remain inflated until regulators curb trading in oil futures by financial speculators, mainly the large investment banks and their hedge and pension fund clients,” said Fadel Gheit, an oil analyst with Oppenheimer & Co. Inc. in New York. Gheit thinks oil should be trading at $60 a barrel, not Thursday’s settle price of $85.17.

Gheit, whose estimate of the cost to consumers is $146 billion annually, said the profits from this speculation “helped fund obscene bonuses at large banks.”

In a poll released this week by the Reuters news agency, some of the biggest names in the oil sector said they think speculators are costing consumers upwards of $300 billion annually. Reuters said it surveyed more than 40 top figures in the oil sector and that 73 percent of them believed today’s oil prices do not reflect actually supply and demand fundamentals but speculation.

Legislation to revamp financial regulation is making its way through the Senate and by year’s end, the markets for complex and secretive trading of oil contracts and other financial instruments by Wall Street firms is expected to become more transparent.

Separately from that effort, the CFTC is also seeking to limit the total number of oil contracts that financial investors can hold.

Read more: http://www.miamiherald.com/2010/04/29/1605081/morgan-stanley-pays-14-million.html#ixzz0mdoEDGgX

Fractal Gold Report for May 1, 2010

By David Nichols
dnichols@fractalpublishing.com

Friday was a very good day for gold.

Gold calmly and quietly broke through the $1,168 energy level, and started a new daily trend. This is textbook bullish stuff, and the evidence is quickly mounting that the next big hyper-growth phase for this gold pattern is already underway — and I think this next move will exceed even the most bullish expectations.

There are still 2 main ways this pattern can develop from here, into the 64-month top scheduled for Dec. 2010/Jan. 2011. The first path would is the easiest, as gold will just move relentlessly higher from here, day after day, with barely a retracement.

The second path will see some of the previous energy levels from the earlier move up become “sticky”, keeping prices hovering around them for a while. This will temporarily delay the huge upside move, but will not affect the ultimate trajectory of the growth pattern.

So I’m not sure which of these two paths gold will take, but again, any early delays in gold’s upside sprint will be easily made up later.

It looks to me like the energy is already coalescing into the next growth phase. Gold looks really good right here.

Gold ended April within a few points of the all-time high monthly close from last November. There is almost nothing left now to hold gold back, as once it breaks into the clear it should just keep going and going.

Monday is Day 32 for this timing cycle, and it will also be 11 trading days up off the bottom on Day 21. So if gold keeps sprinting higher early next week — particularly up to $1,192 or even $1,210 — then we should expect a quick consolidation period. But these consolidation periods should be benign from here.

The market manipulation documented over the last 11 years by GATA has been credibly exposed to the public and soon the MSM will be forced to deal with it. Exposure will still be tainted with politically correct excuses and downplayed impact, but with each passing week more and more people will see. They will see that the $ is propped up by a central bank at the urging of the central government and special interests including bankers and hedge funds. They will see that there is no real safety in bonds based on rancid fiat. Our current path is not sustainable. The citizen must wake up and see that the numbers spewed by the innumerable government agencies are all massaged to paint an image of heath on a dying corpse. They need to pay attention to the criminal white collar thievery conducted by the largest, and heretofore most respected, institutions in the world.

We see bills rammed down the throat of the us citizen/tax payer that destroy our freedom and assign unconstitutional powers to this rapidly evolving socialist government. More and more people are starting to wonder why they haven’t heard of all this before. Many will start to se the problems but will not understand that it was all intentional, planned out to the benefit of elitist thieves. But they will finally start to see the difference between propaganda and truth; between fait and money; between value and image, between what the government says in their sound bytes and their talking points and what they are really doing to our freedom, to our rights, to our constitution and to our money.

It will take millions of people to get educated and realize that they must fight at the ballot box and invest in real value if we are to have a hope of stopping and reversing the current trends. We all need to take possession of physical precious metals and high resource mining stocks! WE need to vote! We need to spread the word to all who will listen. GATA, le Met and dozens of other on line sources of truth exist and, as individuals, we need to point people to those sources.

Change is coming. The direction of this change could go either way. There are millions of gold bugs, tea party folks and just plain informed people who see what is going on and don’t like it! We need to get involved and start making an effort to direct that change toward honest government and honest money. We will never get one without the other!
Go GATA!
Scruffy

Another good find from Voy.

You got to watch this in HD and full screen.

vancouvercondo.info/coaster

Is there a good way to short this market??

Bill H:

To all; I will be out of pocket today but the early call has Gold up nearly $10. This is a very important day as it is a Friday and the last day of April. Should we close at these levels, the weekly charts will confirm the recent breakout and this I believe will be an all time high close on the monthlies! A rapid test of the old highs at $1,218 should take place shortly and with the physical market as strong as it is I don’t think the battle at this level will last long. The shares have remained firm all week and a confirmation of this next leg I believe will come from the quasi dormant juniors. If the juniors can catch a strong bid and move hard to the upside here, then I believe THIS IS the move we have all been waiting so patiently for. The saying goes “keep your fingers crossed” but this has nothing to do with luck, this is about mathematics. The “math” has been suppressed for a very long time but great wealth will be created by those who did the math and stuck to their guns no matter how many times they were told 2+2=5! Regards and have a nice weekend, Bill H.

I e-mailed the kids…told them to get ahold of me at the first sign of any trouble….heck they can stay here for a night or two…..in between excursions…..Lancaster meets Belize ..haaaaaaa

Now that Goldman begins to fall,
and Fed actions begin to pall,
a parabola forms in ancient GOLD,
just as markets begin to fold.

All the fallen are made of paper,
the game is called the printing caper.
No wonder GOLD now looks so strong,
when even countries are proven wrong.

Iceland explodes from inner debt,
Greece has joined the beggars’ set.
The USA begins to teeter,
hear the ticking of the doomsday meter.

Kudlow frowns at GOLD’s bold rise.
First he giggles, and then he cries.
He wants to know what’s going on,
GOLD increases from night to dawn.

I’ve seen a parabola in the stars.
It stretches from Earth all the way to Mars.
In ancient times they called it bold,
the rising arc that is made of GOLD.

a 7 point rpw in aussie dollar. point 7 is april 12. i missed this one. it had a very low risk entry.

rno

Expect to see more of these going Forward :

Alamos Gold

Lakeshore Gold

Osisko Gold

Rubicon

San Gold

Semafo Gold

Silvercorp Metals

Taseko

Then there’s ECU Silver….just to balance things out a bit

After releasing the Friday Road Trip last night a “World of Hurt” has been cast on Goldman Sachs. My resoning behind Buffett’s coming attack on Goldman seems to be taking shape faster than even I expected.

I want to WARN everybody, again, that Warren Buffett will most likely deliver the death blow to Goldman at his Annual Shareholders Meeting tomorrow.

EXPECT MAJOR CHAOS NEXT WEEK AS A RUN ON GOLDMAN MAY SPARK A RUN ON THE ENTIRE BANKING SYSTEM!

Have a nice weekend!

Bix
www.roadtoroota.com/public/department39.cfm

Danes are on their way to your neck of the woods the next couple of days…have also forwarded to you an email for your consideration.

Big thanks,

auDept

between where you live and we live, at this time of year we do have the pleasure of very colorful gardens in this season (Rhododendrons now in bloom, cherry and peach blossoms already having dropped their petals, and most trees already in full leaf - except our silk tree (Albizzia), called Mimosa in some parts of the continent, which surprisingly does not leaf out here until early June). A beautiful time of the year. And it has been a very pleasing precious metals market in the last few days too. What more could one wish for? Life is good. Have a good weekend. Cheers. Equiz.

“Loyalty to petrified opinion never yet broke a chain or freed a human soul.” Mark Twain (From TDL 30 Apr 10)

From your East Coast Friend, 6 C and not a leaf on a tree…….

We’ll be OK

Take Care

Winedoc

You’re welcome on the clarification and thanks for the cautionary note. I can always appreciate any poster who is able to use caution at a time like this because it is easy to get giddy and possibly set yourself up for a fall. Take care honey.

We too, stubbornly I suppose, will continue to hold onto Mega Uranium and Pinetree Capital which were investment ideas that we picked up when we had a paid subscription to The Dines Letter. I know that some prevailing professional advice (and not necessarily the advice from Mr. Dines, especially when it involves stocks that he has pushed so hard) is that one should admit to past investment mistakes and just bail out and take one’s losses when one realizes that a mistake has been made. In this case I am stubborn enough to hang on - for a long time- to both Mega Uranium and Pinetree capital. And I have different reasons to hang onto each of these, for different fundamental reasons for each of them. I dont blame Mr. Dines for any bad investments we now hold, although I must admit that I was swirled in by his former enthusiasm for these Mega Uranium and Pinetree Capital holdings.

Best wishes, as we hang onto some unproductive Dines suggestions. I am learning. Slowly. Have a good weekend. Equiz. p.s. I wish that I could be as smart as the smartest investors who post on Goldtent.

or is it € contagion looks quite similar to last Asian Contagion some short 20 years ago.

Happy dreams - frr

looks like you’ve tried to negotiate some quicksand and so you’ve extricated yourself so far; I still feel a bit disappointed about the personal accusations - even if meant as a warning - as in reality this type of negativity towards any poster is very much going against my grain and I would suggest to hack it out between the two of you - and in the end I’ve got to reiterate that I’m neither a TA guy, nor a TA astrology guy or follower of Arch Crawford, though still love to listen to him;  Same as the Prechterites, now being wrong, premature or simply mnisinterpreting the long Kontratieff wave to their own folly for the last 30 years - when TA by itself wasn’t a big factor.

The self fullfilling prophecies of TA has been adopted by the b(G)anksters and the PPT  long before the new breed of math geniuses brought the whole system of controlled risk to its knees - see Black, Scholes; LTCM, AMARANTH - the lovely story of a GS Commodity Index - sending the nat gas component down 85% in two tranches and taking over for scrap… and so on …

I wonder, if TA can be or ever become a beacon of  real value in this environment. Anyway, it’s not for me as I’m standing up to my beliefs and have profited from it over the last 10 plus years.

ps if there is a retracement which means a steep decline it may not be as bad as that in 08 because guessing of course it wont as the shoulder made this last jan was higher than the right shoulder made in 08 which was equal to or lower than the left shoulder. May not be as bad but will be bad enough for anyone holding because if it corrects if this is a head formtion its making the righ shoulder may not even form it could just head straight down without warning. Just something to watch out for.

fgc- one more time
-> Posted by redneckokie1 @ 23:23 pm on August 24, 2008
a reverse point wave is formed when a formation is created similar to a broadening top or bottom. i will describe a bottom. a rpw at the top is simply reversed.
point 5 is the low day
point 3 is lower than point 1 but higher than point 5
point 4 is higher than point 2.
a seven point rpw is another high from point 5 (point 6) then another low below point 5 (point 7)
look at the yen chart. point 7 made tonight, point 6 is high of aug 21, point 5 is low of aug 15, point 4 is the high of aug 13, point 3 is low of aug 11, point 2 is high of aug 7, point one is the low of aug 6.
several strategies can be used for entry, exit and stops. the highest percentage is to enter on a close above the high of the low day. sometimes the risk is way too high because the stop should be a significant distance below the low of 5 or 7. look at december silver. the stop would be $2.00 away.
i cheated on the entry point tonight on a british pound. the rsi w/divergence indicates a bottom is near. the 7 point on the yen also indicates the same. the rsi on the usd index is almost off the chart. grains are in rally mode while the usd index is up. one (grains or usdx) will turn soon. we also have a h&s in the making in the gold and a rpw in the silver. they also slammed some of the markets just after the opening and didn’t take out the lows within the first two hours. i was able to enter with a stop at about $250. loss and a potential $5000. gain. i like those odds.
the hard part of the rpw is to get in with acceptable risk. sometimes you get a reversal on the point 5 day and the market trades back to 50% of the bottom days range. it’s very common to get a h&s bottom with the left shoulder being point 3 and the head is point 5.
hope this helps.
rno

Thanks for clarifing where that came from. I dont recall PM ever talking about charts other that the work and evens of history on a fundamental basis. I saw Rambus chart here on the tent and the one I saw I couldnt agree with him more whether he found it I  dont know or noticed it. We could go up from here or we are now in the head formation of a head and shoulders pattern. Shoulder made april beg. that is what Im watching right now although that was not the topic of his post. But like they say DYODD lol If u arent a chartist a retracment is something that happened before showing the same pattern I saw it awhile back act. in Nov. and is meant to be a warning of caution. It make short term trading quite easy right now although wasnt trading aside from short position on S&p at end trading day last friday, that was some timing lol but its gonna sit there for awhile. Wish I could be in right now. But at it reaches up toward say nother 20-40 points keep close eye on gold. Well as they say again DYODD.  Your a good egg golden, only reason Im talking about it lol