Saturday, February 25, 2023

US Hegemony and Its Perils | MFA of PRC

 
Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the People's Republic of China 
 
2023-02-20 16:28
 
US Hegemony and Its Perils

Introduction

Since becoming the world's most powerful country after the two world wars and the Cold War, the United States has acted more boldly to interfere in the internal affairs of other countries, pursue, maintain and abuse hegemony, advance subversion and infiltration, and willfully wage wars, bringing harm to the international community.

The United States has developed a hegemonic playbook to stage "color revolutions," instigate regional disputes, and even directly launch wars under the guise of promoting democracy, freedom and human rights. Clinging to the Cold War mentality, the United States has ramped up bloc politics and stoked conflict and confrontation. It has overstretched the concept of national security, abused export controls and forced unilateral sanctions upon others. It has taken a selective approach to international law and rules, utilizing or discarding them as it sees fit, and has sought to impose rules that serve its own interests in the name of upholding a "rules-based international order."

This report, by presenting the relevant facts, seeks to expose the U.S. abuse of hegemony in the political, military, economic, financial, technological and cultural fields, and to draw greater international attention to the perils of the U.S. practices to world peace and stability and the well-being of all peoples.

 


"It is a pivotal moment, it's one that's crystallizing the change that's happening, and it is accelerating.
If you are an American, and you want to understand why it's happening so fast, look no further than at the
White House and the person who is there in the Oval Office, and the team around him, this terrible gaggle
of ideologues and neocons who have captured control of the foreign policy of the US.
"
The Duran, Feb 25, 2023.

Wednesday, February 22, 2023

Modern Fractional Reserve Banking - A Ponzi Scheme | Murray N. Rothbard

The banker issues fake warehouse receipts and lends them out as if they were real warehouse receipts represented by cash. At the same time, the original depositor thinks that his warehouse receipts are represented by money available at any time he wishes to cash them in. Here we have the system of fractional reserve banking, in which more than one warehouse receipt is backed by the same amount of gold or other cash in the bank’s vaults.
 

It should be clear that modern fractional reserve banking is a shell game, a Ponzi scheme, a fraud in which fake warehouse receipts are issued and circulate as equivalent to the cash supposedly represented by the receipts.

 
See also:

Disgusted | Vladimir Putin

They behaved just as shamelessly and duplicitously when destroying Yugoslavia, Iraq, Libya, and Syria. They will never be able to wash off this shame. The concepts of honour, trust, and decency are not for them.


Over the long centuries of colonialism, diktat and hegemony, they got used to being allowed everything, got used to spitting on the whole world. It turned out that they treat people living in their own countries with the same disdain, like a master.
 

[...] Look what they are doing to their own people. It is all about the destruction of the family, of cultural and national identity, perversion and abuse of children, including pedophilia, all of which are declared normal in their life [...] But here is what I would like to tell them: look at the holy scripture and the main books of other world religions [...] Millions of people in the West realise that they are being led to a spiritual disaster. Frankly, the elite appear to have gone crazy, and it looks like there is no cure for that.

 Translated Video HERE
 
See also:
 

India's Role in the New Multi-Polar World Order | Timur Fomenko

Timur Fomenko (21 Feb, 2023) - The truth, though, is that they don’t truly see India as an equal. They hope, given the foundations of its political system, that India will one day be “the same” as they are, and anticipate a course of liberalization and political change under their guidance, similar to what was once expected from Russia and China. But, if India fails to follow that route, or continues to grow as an autonomous power which does not consent to Western dominance, the chances are that the West’s tolerance for the country, and especially for Modi’s government, will run out.
 
At the helm of a superpower of the future: Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

What happens when India becomes wealthy and powerful and does not eagerly accept the Western-centric political world order? Also, what if it seeks to be a geopolitical power in its own terms? What happens when Western countries begin to perceive India not as a partner in need of help and support, but as a rival in a similar vein to how they view China and, of course, Russia? What happens when the US-led Indo-Pacific initiative starts to appear not as something that would incorporate and help India, but something that could also potentially contain its military rise?

India’s current foreign policy is often described as “strategic autonomy,” but in recent years the country has been overly friendly with the US to exploit mutual anti-China sentiment in a bid to gain economic opportunities for itself. At the same time, there has been a domestic political shift in India which orients it away from westernization. The West’s good will for New Delhi, a superpower of the future, will one day run out, and the agenda will shift towards containment. India needs to look at what is happening now with China and be ready when that day comes.

Sunday, February 19, 2023

Point & Line | Charles Drummond

Charles Drummond (1979)- And, with succinct regularity, it became obvious that all of the input for several days, weeks and months gave birth to each day's high/low/close in a constant manner and this expression when analyzed, signaled the story in relation to its past history - the mathematical dot, and the movement of prices around it.  
 

 
Gracious me, there were constants all over the place:
  • prices each day moved a maximum of "x" mm away from the ‘dot' line.
  • prices each day, moved a maximum of "x" cents up or down from the dot itself.
  • prices eventually stop moving above the main line in an up market into an area or channel just under the line, and in an up moving market, prices are topping.
  • the dots started to move closer and closer together in an upmarket and the market was topping.
  • dots swung off the main dot line - bells ringing left and right - market is topping.
  • the dot is swinging more, it's falling under or above. The dot didn't swing under or above. And since it didn't, and not doing what it's supposed to do, the opposite is happening.
  • instead of the dot going up exactly in a straight line, or down in a straight line, they are "snaking" very close to each other, horizontally - we're in a congestion.
Often I can tell, two days into a congestion that we're into a congestion.

Quoted from:
Charles Drummond (1979) - How to make Money in the Futures Market ... and lots of it.
 
 
See also:
Ted Hearne (2022) - Drummond Geometry: Uncover Hidden Market Structure.
Ted Hearne (2007) - Drummond Geometry: Picking Yearly Highs and Lows in Interbank Forex Trading.  
In: David Keller (2007) - Breakthroughs in Technical Analysis.

Monkey Business

Once upon a time a man appeared in a village and announced to the villagers that he would buy monkeys for $10 each. The villagers, seeing that there were many monkeys around, went out to the forest, and started catching them. The man bought thousands at $10 and as supply started to diminish, the villagers stopped their effort. He further announced that he would now buy at $20. This renewed the efforts of the villagers and they started catching monkeys again. Soon the supply diminished even further and people started going back to their farms. The offer increased to $25 each and the supply of monkeys became so little that it was an effort to even see a monkey, let alone catch it! The man now announced that he would buy monkeys at $50!
 

 
However, since he had to go to the city on some business, his assistant would now buy on his behalf. In the absence of the man, the assistant told the villagers. "Look at all these monkeys in the big cage that the man has collected. I will sell them to you at $35 and when the man returns from the city, you can sell them to him for $50 each." The villagers rounded up with all their savings and bought all the monkeys. They never saw the man nor his assistant again, only monkeys everywhere!

Tuesday, February 14, 2023

50 years after leaving Vietnam | Lost in Translation

Matthieu Buge (Feb 14, 2023) - In Francis Ford Coppola’s movie ‘Apocalypse Now’, the character Hubert de Marais has this very important line which he delivers with a typical French accent: “The Vietnamese are very intelligent. You never know what they think. The Russian ones who help them – ‘come and give us their money. We are all communists. Chinese give us guns. We are all brothers.’ They hate the Chinese! Maybe they hate the American less than the Russian and the Chinese. I mean, if tomorrow the Vietnamese are communists they will be Vietnamese communists. And this is something you never understood, you Americans.


Coppola had, in the ‘70’s, understood something that former US Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara only came to understand in the ‘90’s when he met with Vietnamese General Vo Nguyen Giap. With astonishment, he suddenly realized that the Vietnamese were fighting a war of independence, not an ideological war. The 20-year conflict in Vietnam had never been about the spread of communism in the world. Concerning US foreign policy, the elderly and experienced politician went on to say: “We don’t understand the Bosnians, we don’t understand the Chinese, and we don’t really understand the Iranians.” With the exception of colonized Western Europe, it seems to be a good summary of Washington’s policy towards countries all over the world.

Quoted from:

Monday, February 13, 2023

The Arithmetic of Pump & Dump Patterns | Jesse Livermore


Jesse Livermore was born in 1877 in Shrewsbury, Massachusetts, to a poverty-stricken farmer family. He learned to read and write at the age of three-and-a-half. At the age of 14 his father pulled him out of school to help with the farm. However, with his mother's blessing, Livermore ran away from home to begin to live on his own behalf and responsibility aged 14 as a quotation board boy at a Boston stock brokerage business earning $5 per week. By 1923 Livermore was one of the richest people in the world. He was, he believed, particularly suited to his first job because of his strong abilities in mental arithmetic and number memorization.
 
The 1870 census in the US found that 1 out of every 8 children below 14 years old
was a wage slave. By 1910 it was 1 out of 5.
 
Stock and commodity prices came into his broker’s office on a ticker tape, a continuous strip of paper. It was Livermore’s job to read, to memorize and to transfer all the price numbers as they come in to the quotation board outside for all the broker’s different clientele crowds in and around the trading pits and lobbies to be seen and to animate them to act in that very specific foolish way they were expected to act: buying and selling and placing buy-, sell- and stop orders at certain levels. This is exactly what generates these constantly repeating tremendous opportunities, profits and cuts for the broker and for the invisible Composite Operator over there in New York and in Chicago. He realized that for the rest of his life his destiny became aligned to this information of the ticker tape and his ability to understand the message of the algorithm. Livermore literally saw patterns in the waves of numbers that flowed each day from the tape and aligned his activity accordingly. He began to write those numbers in his own notebook and tested himself, predicting the direction that different stock prices would take at certain levels, times and days. 
 
Patterns in the Waves of Numbers:
Arithmetic of the Pump and Dump.
 
Price delivered by Composite Man for the broker through the broker to the broker's different clientele crowds. Livermore realized that scheme generates more profit than any other business activity ever known to man. For the Composite Operator. Hence he aligned himself to the tune of the invisible Composite Operator's price algorithm coming in on the ticker tape from New York and Chicago. The cumulative price range of all one minute price bars of any instrument traded by any broker on any given day nowadays exceeds what is called The Average Daily Price Range by the factor of fifty. Fifty times the so called average daily trading range during each and every single trading day. Up and down. Every day. Say the average daily price range of a given instrument is 1,000, the cumulative price will range around 50,000 during any trading day. Up and down. From balance to imbalance back and forth in this very specific manner and sequence through time and price.
 
He used breakouts to a high degree of success. He would wait for price to break above a certain pivot level and then go long to ride on the emerging trend. Daily and weekly highs and lows, session highs and lows, measured moves and Floor Trader's Daily and Weekly Pivot Point Levels provide all clues for Livermore's pivotal levels. He would exit a trade only when a similar breakout occurs in the opposite direction, signifying a potential reversal in trend after a peak formation high or low, that is a change of structure and direction of price. If the reversal signal is strong enough, he would take a short trade and ride the bear market.
 
"Many years of my life had been devoted to speculation before it dawned upon me that nothing new was happening in the stock market, that price movements were simply being repeated, that while there was variation in different stocks the general price pattern was the same." Livermore used to say: "Whatever happens in the stock market today has happened before and will happen again". 
 
In his notebook Livermore fills prices into columns headed Secondary Rally  -  Natural Rally Up Trend  - Down Trend  -  Natural Reaction, and Secondary Reaction.
 
Trend Change Rules

Livermore’s approach to swing trading required two filters: (1.) a larger swing filter and (2.) a penetration filter of one-half the size of the swing filter. Penetrations were significant at price levels he called pivot points. A pivot point is defined in retrospect as the top and bottom of each new swing. The pivot points in the below swing chart are marked with letters. Positions are taken only in the direction of the major trend. A major uptrend is defined by confirming higher highs and higher lows, and a major downtrend by lower lows and lower highs, and where the penetration filter (swing filter) is not broken in the reverse direction. That is, an uptrend is still intact as long as prices do not decline below the previous pivot point by as much as the amount of the penetration filter. Once the trend is identified, positions are added each time a new penetration occurs, confirming the trend's direction. A stop-loss is placed at the point of penetration beyond the prior pivot point. Unfortunately Livermore never revealed how the penetration point was calculated. It seems however to be a percentage of the current swing size (e.g. 16%, 20%, 25%, 33%,50%)
 
Failed Reversal in the Livermore Method

In Livermore's system the first penetration of the stop-loss (a swing high or low depending on the direction of the trade) calls for liquidation of the current position. A second penetration is the necessary confirmation for the new trend. If the second penetration fails (at point K) it is considered a secondary reaction within the old trend. The downtrend may be re-entered at a distance of the swing filter below K, guaranteeing that point K is defined, and again on the next swing, following pivot point M when prices reach the penetration level below pivot point L. It is easier to re-enter an old trend than to establish a position in a new one.
 
This is Jesse Livormore's insight and conclusion:
  1. Markets are never wrong opinions often are. Back your judgment and don't trust your opinion, until the action of the market itself confirms your opinion.
  2. Few people ever make money on tips, beware of inside information. If there was easy money lying around, no one would be forcing it into your pocket.
  3. Money is made by sitting, not trading. It takes time to make money. Don't give me timing; give me time.
  4. Buy right, sit tight. Big movements take time to develop. Men who can both be right and sit tight are uncommon.
  5. Money cannot consistently be made by trading every day or every week during the year.
  6. Nothing new ever occurs in the business of speculating or investing in securities and commodities.
  7. Never average losses.
  8. The human side of every person is the greatest enemy of the average investor or speculator. Wishful thinking must be banished.
 

References:
Richard D. Wyckoff (1920) - Jesse Livermore's Methods of Trading in Stocks.
Edwin Lefèvre (1923) - Reminiscences of a Stock Operator.
Jesse Livermore (1940) - How To Trade In Stocks.
Jesse Thompson (1983) - The Livermore System. In: Technical Analysis of Stocks & Commodities. 
Mark B. Fisher (2002) - The Logical Trader.
 Richard Smitten (2005) - Trade Like Jesse Livermore.

The Closing Auction | Price Discovery, Liquidity, and Disagreement

 

The closing auction accounts for a striking 7.5% of daily volume in 2018, up from 3.1% in 2010. The growth of indexing and ETFs shifts trading towards the close and distorts closing prices: they often deviate from closing quote midpoints, but the deviations revert by half shortly after the close and fully overnight. As volume migrates towards the close, liquidity at the open deteriorates.

Quoted from:
Vincent Bogousslavsky & Dmitriy Muravyev (Dec 3, 2020) - Who Trades at the Close?
Implications for Price Discovery, Liquidity, and Disagreement.

See also:
TPR (Jan 12, 2023) - The ICT Power of 3: Accumulation - Manipulation - Distribution (AMD).

Friday, February 10, 2023

Trading Tips from the Front Office | Tom Hougaard

In 2007 I visited the oil pit in New York. I got some rather unusual trading advice from a 20-year veteran of the pits. The floor traders seem to have a unique take on the market, probably because they are so close to the forces of demand and supply unleashed in the pit. Here is what the trader told me:
 
1. The First Cut Is The Cheapest
‘The first cut is usually the cheapest. I see so many of the new traders who are unable to take a loss. They hold on to their position for too long. They don’t understand that I too am wrong more times that I am right, but I cut the trade the moment I am in doubt. That first cut has kept me alive in the pit for 20 years.’
 
15 Minute Bar Chart of Crude Oil with red Simple Moving Average of 60 bars:
Price goes where the Other Time Frame Traders have their Stop (Loss) or Limit (Buy or Sell) Orders: Around Highs and Lows of previous
1 Hour and 4 Hour Bars, Sessions, Days, Weeks, Months, Quarters, Years, 3 Years.
Look for Peak Formations a.k.a. Reversal Patterns around these Levels (QM Patterns, V-, M-, W Formations).
Dotted blue horizontals = Yesterday's High and Low
Blue solid horizontals = Last Week's High and Low
Red Solid Horizontal = Last Months High and Low.
See also HERE

2. The Market is Efficient
He also told me about the nature of the market: ‘The market is efficient. It wants to go where the orders are. These orders can be stop (loss) orders or limit (buy or sell) orders. I asked him to elaborate and he said: ‘often the market will go to a certain price just to make sure as many people are filled as possible, and then it reverses. We say in the pit that they push them up to take them down.’

3. Trend Days Are The Best
I asked him about intraday trends. He told me he had the advantage of being able to see the orders from the brokers. His best days were ‘trend days’, where the market continues in one direction all day. This point was aired by others I met in the pit. If a good trend was developing intraday, these guys would press it for all it was worth, irrespective of who was on the other side of the trade. They were never concerned about whether the market technicals were overbought or oversold. The only thing they had in mind was to press it as high or as low as they could before the bell rang.

Quoted from:
Tom Hougaard (2011) - Trading at the Top: Trading Tips and Strategies from a Professional Trader.

See also:

The Lost Momentum Trend Following Strategy | Tom Hougaard

A dear child has many names. The strategy below is called ‘lost momentum’ in my vocabulary, but it no doubt has other names too. It is in essence a form of trend-following strategy.
 

Ingredient No. 1: Define the Trend
I recommend using a simple or exponential moving average (MA) of more than 50 bars. Some have reported good results with the 62 period MA. I don’t want you to get too bogged down with rigid definitions. You are looking for a trending market, which trades above your chosen MA, and the MA is pointing up (for long positions – reverse the instructions below for short positions).

Ingredient No. 2: Define your Time Frame
You can use this technique on any time frame. I find it lends itself very well to day trading on the 15-minute chart, and swing trading on the four-hour chart.

Set-Up for 'Buy Signal'
Your chosen market is trading above your MA indicator and the MA is pointing up. If you observe that the market is taking out a previous low (that previous low must be at least 8 bars prior to the current bar), you now wait until the market closes back above the price point of the previous low. That is your buy signal.
 
[...] The technique stems from the observation that even in a trending market you will often find that price dips below a previous low, only to immediately resume its trend higher. All I attempt to do is to trade in the direction of the trend defined by the moving average. I reverse the instruction above for selling. 
 
[...] In the morning, around 8 am, I look at what the high over the overnight range is. I then wait for the market to take out either the high or the low of the range. If, and only if, the market then trades back into the range, after having taking out the high or the low of the range, I prepare an order to enter the market at the 62 per cent retracement over the range. This order comes complete with a stop and a target too. It doesn’t trigger every day though.

Quoted from:
Tom Hougaard (2011) - Trading at the Top: Trading Tips and Strategies from a Professional Trader.
 

W.D. Gann's Personal Daily Bread & Butter Trading Strategy | Tom Hougaard

I want to tell you about a world famous trader named W. D. Gann. He wrote many courses on trading, some of which were exceptionally esoteric in content. Gann was supposedly a very clever man, so it came as no surprise to me that the man who made his millions selling forecasts to people actually made his money from a remarkably simple trading method.
 

My friend and trading partner David Paul once spent a whole summer at the British Library, researching past wheat and beans prices, and tracking Gann’s trades to get to the nitty gritty of his actual trading strategy. His conclusion was startling. He told me that ‘Gann simply traded double tops and lows in the direction of the daily trend, nothing more, nothing less’. After eight weeks in the archives of the library he was adamant that what Gann wrote in his courses and what he traded were two very different things. Maybe the lesson for all of us is to keep things as simple as possible.

Quoted from:
Tom Hougaard (2011) - Trading at the Top: Trading Tips and Strategies from a Professional Trader.

Tuesday, February 7, 2023

On the Price of Russian Oil | Igor Sechin

The EU will no longer set prices for Russia’s flagship Urals oil blend, now that Asia is the largest consumer of western-sanctioned Russian crude, the head of the country’s oil major Rosneft, Igor Sechin, said on Monday.

An EU embargo on seaborne exports of crude accompanied by price caps on oil and petroleum products originating from Russia has triggered a reshuffle in global oil supply. In a matter of months, Moscow rerouted most of its oil flows that used to go to Europe, to Asian markets. The country has ramped up its seaborne oil shipments to China, India and Türkiye at the expense of Western nations.
 

Oil exports to India alone jumped 33 times in December, with Russia now the country’s largest supplier, replacing Iraq. About 70% of Urals cargoes loaded last month went to New Delhi, according to Reuters calculations.

If Russian oil does not enter the European market, then there is no reference price. Reference prices will be formed where oil volumes actually go,” Sechin pointed out, speaking at the India Energy Week forum.

The Russian government is now discussing how to calculate Russia's taxable oil price following the import ban and price caps set by the EU and G7 countries. Currently, for tax purposes, the average price for Urals on the world market is used, in particular in the ports of Augusta (Italy) and Rotterdam (Netherlands). But due to sanctions, Russian oil is practically not supplied there. Sechin also suggested that “futures contracts, futures settlements” should be abandoned at the first stage in order to regulate market indicators. To stress his point, the head of Russia’s oil giant even quoted from the Bible. “As it is written in Ecclesiastes, "What is crooked cannot be made straight. And what is lacking cannot be counted.

Meanwhile, Asian buyers have ramped up imports of a wide variety of Russian crude oil, including lesser-known Arctic grades. Two other popular blends, ESPO and Sokol, have been trading above the Western price ceiling of $60 a barrel, at $66 and $71 per barrel respectively, as of Tuesday.
 
Quoted from:
 
See also: