We must always be careful that, when making a forecast, it is not our hopes or fears that are doing the talking.
This report takes an objective look at the lessons from the 1918 pandemic for today.
I conclude with a quick look at the risks from here that they never had to face back in 1918.

The world around us has always been changing. However since the onset of the great accelerant of the Covid-19 pandemic, there is the risk that the world may be changing faster than our ability to comprehend. From this perspective, this report makes some observations and asks some important questions.

This is the first report I have ever done that I was deeply reluctant to release. But if we hesitate to learn from difficult times, then we are in very deep trouble.

Some government programs do great good and uplift humanity. Other government programs do no harm. Yet other government programs have had disastrous results. Such as government intervention in the markets.

Some of Topics I will be covering:

WTI - An expiration postmortem
Looking Forward - The looming Brent, Product and NatGas Expirations
Spot and Time Spreads
Short, Medium, and Long Term Structural Updates
Options for the Longer Term Perspective

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This report uses two longer term forecasts to highlight the profound value of a good technical analysis

Is there anything that technical analysis can tell us about pandemics and the risks of Covic-19 from here?
That is the subject of this brief report.

There is over-valued, and then there is over-valued. This report is an exercise in valuations that compares the Aramco IPO and Tesla. Aramco and Tesla are arguably at the two opposite extremes of the technology spectrum, and are from the two opposite extremes of culture.

What we learned. Or more to the point, what we remembered that we had forgotten

20 June 2019 - This brief report offers up a critique of the issue of US manufacturing job losses - based on the actual history.

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Two very different back to back covers from the 7th to 13th July 2018 issue of 'The Economist' raise some serious and profound questions about what might be on tap for the markets

This report looks to current events in social media from the perspective of the history of economic engines, and the vantage point of technical analysis.

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This report employs behavioral economics and technical analysis to help decipher current events.

Elections do not change the destiny of a nation. Elections display the nature of the collective consciousness of a nation. It is this collective mood that decides the destiny of a nation. And the collective mood pivots around .618 to .382 extremes.

These ‘observations’ reports employ insights from technical analysis to explore the nexus of current events, popular culture, history, and geo-politics. This report employs insights from technical analysis to explore how the British ‘Doctor Who’ science fiction series might help explain the Brexit vote and its repercussions. The popular entertainment of a nation always reveals the collective mood of that nation. And science fiction by its very nature has a relatively free rein to more accurately explore and reflect the collective mood. This report explores why a closer look at the popularity of the ‘Doctor Who’ series might have made the Brexit vote a bit less of a shock. And a deeper understanding of the vein of collective mood that ‘Doctor Who’ is mining might also help better prepare us for what lies ahead.

In January 2000 as AOL and Time-Warner were getting togther, not a single analyst saw anything that could possibly go wrong. Yet that marriage quickly gained the status of the worst merger of all time. Now as AT&T buys Time-Warner we are hearing the same rosy rheotric we heard back in January 2000. If there are problems ahead, we will only be able to detect them in the price action. Forget the analysts. They tend to instantly like any buy-out. Let us employ this opportunity as a technical tutroial and look to the price charts.

This post is the sequel to and elaboration of my last observations piece. It should be glaring obvious to everyone by now that the Brexit vote to leave was a decision that was motivated by neither financial nor economic considerations. However it is a big mistake to chalk it up to low brow and uninformed populism.

Technical analysis can help reveal a deeper understanding of the markets, and of collective human behavior in general. In this piece I employ what we have learned from technical analysis to generate a new perspective on the Brexit situation.

When it comes to forecasting crude oil prices Wall Street analysts have an abysmal track record. What are they doing that is so wrong? This situation provides an excellent perspective on the critical differences differences between fundamental and technical analysis

The superficial exogenous view of market price action is that OPEC news causes price trends. A closer look reveals compelling evidence for an endogenous view of market price action. In the endogenous price trends arise from the dynamic nature of the markets themselves. No external stimulus is needed to induce price trends, and the price trends are cyclical in nature. This brief piece looks at this exogenous versus endogenous issue in terms of OPEC and the 15 year commodity cycle.

Negative Interest rates on government bonds and central bank deposits can strike one as an 'Alice in Wonderland' through the looking glass degree tear in the financial space-time continuum. It appears to stand 5,000 years of interest rate history on its head. So why the tremendous investor demand for negative rates? This report places negative interest rates in the context of long term historical trends - and the post 1999 golden age of the speculative bubble. I employ Adrian Brody's role in the 2010 film 'Wrecked' as a parable to help flesh out the issues.

Great enough fear creates the thing being feared. This is an age old truth of human nature. And it is a reality alive and well in today's financial markets. In this piece I explore the metaphysical basis of central bank intervention. And this leads me to explore the case for deflation as the Fed's own self created monster.

These are the slides from the webcast in .pdf format

A man goes into a dimly lit shed and in his fear he mistakes a coil of rope for a giant snake. He runs out of the shed screaming and quickly panics the entire village. Out of fear or mere carelessness, one mistakenly perceives something in the present for something seen in the past - a mistake with consequences.

This is the sister report to my 15 Jan 2015 report "How Wall Street Misses." In that report I updated the long standing inability of Wall Street to forecast crude oil prices. The tools of fundamental analysis have yielded notoriously bad energy price forecasts since Wall Street began coveringpetroleum prices. This is an on-going scandal that has been hiding in plain view. In this report I summarize some of my recent multi-year price forecasts in the petroleum complex, using the tools of technical analysis. THe results have been dramatically different than the laughable results out of fundamental analysis.

Fans of the status quo should take no solace from the recent “no” vote out of Scotland. The long term trend in the number of sovereign states is still very much pointing up.

Since early 2012 I have been tracking a major disconnect in the global financial markets that has made less and less sense over time. Over time it has grown from an annoyance to a very serious problem. I refer to the disconnect between price trends in commodities and equities. This report offers a fresh perspective on this historic divergence.

The press is fond of citing ‘the oil weapon’ as something Putin may wield against the west if he does not get his way with the Ukraine. Here we discover that the reverse is true. The real ‘oil weapon’ is something that US can exercise against Putin’s Russia.

This report reviews the current vulnerable technical condition of a few critical world markets from the perspective of Vladimir Putin’s recent tactics and larger strategy. I explore the issue of endogenous versus exogenous dynamics in the bursting of a speculative bubble in the light of current events. I also delve into the related issue of why ‘bad things happen in bear markets.’

Since nuclear weapons made wars unfashionable nation-states have been forced to explore over avenues to display their national pride. High on the list of national pride PR ventures are hosting the Olympics and the World Cup. However hosting such an event does not improve national characer traits. It only reveals those traits.

This brief update is a follow up to my 3rd May 2014 Observations report "Vladimir Putin is a Thug."That report traced the timeline of the transformation of Russia under Putin from communism to fascism.

Here we survey the events in the Ukraine from the perspectives of behavioral economics, European and Ukrainian history, and the role of a collective mood of fear and hopelessness as the fountainhead of both acts of aggression and of major bear markets.

In a 16 January 2014 report I explored the law of adverse consequences, or blowback, in the context of the QE program of the Federal Reserve. Just a few weeks later we have been gifted with a perfect example of how QE creates blowback.

The sheer magnitude and unrelenting insistence of the Quantitative Easing program of the Federal Reserve strongly suggests that we should view it as yet another attempt to force the world to improve. History shows us that the more forceful the efforts to make the world a better place, the more dramatic and harmful the blowback. In this report we explore QE from the perspective of the law of adverse consequences.

The Federal Reserve Act passed on 23rd December of 1913. Comparing the stated goals of the Federal Reserve with the actual history it is not too difficult to spot 100 years of failure.

When a truly disruptive technology comes along objective and cool-headed analysis of the pros and cons are often crowded out by deeply emotional reactions and by strident defenses of the status quo. In this analysis of the main categories of Bitcoin critiques I attempt to filter out the unjust judgements from the valid criticisms.

In our tutorial on Fibonacci aspects of consensus we show that polling results typically yield the Fibonacci 62% to 38% result. That is why Fibonacci retracements are common in the markets. The markets are a voting both where you cast your ballots with buy and sell orders. Today I revisit this issue with the daily SportsNation polls.