Oh, yeah, ain't that the truth? I like to just watch their minds work...

inventors are ;)

wasn't there some engineer, somewhere, who said something about shutting of the motor of the world? Don't remember his name....smart guy, tho.

I share your enthusiasm for some foreign markets and have exposure in India and Taiwan. I have been net short the US equity market and plan to increase that position. If you think crashes are easy to predict, let me know when you predict the next one. I've never found them easy to predict, and have been either early or dead wrong on the ones I've predicted.

If you're leveraged 10 or more times to one, which most commodity traders are, it is.

I predicted that in 1995 and missed out on a lot of market. About 550 BCE coins replaced cattle as money, yet, we still trade cattle in a huge market. We have more sailing ships now than the world of 1500 could have imagined. In Jane Jacobs's classic _The Economy of Cities_, she pointed out that older forms of industry and commerce seldom (if ever) disappear, but only change and are adapted to new circumstances. If I had a million dollars, I would put $100K in gold (and silver) and the rest in the stock market - but not just the NYSE: DAX, Hang Seng, ... I am long on capitalism. SLL wrote: ..."the Dow will put in a high today that will last years and that a gigantic crash and economic depression is imminent." Up, down, up, down: crashes are easy to predict.

4% is not what I call a "plunge."

Thanks again, for the clarification. How, then does this color the future of gold, given that it is also state-controlled and is traded in phony bookkeeping between central banks. (I do note, also, that money is the SECOND use of gold. Moreover, it appears that private monetary ("investment") holdings eclipse central bank reserves.)

http://www.gold.org/supply-and-demand/go...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold

Thanks! I never thought of technical trading as tracking other people's emotions, tracking the madness of crowds, I suppose. The "quants" I know - and I do not know them very well - seem to have no model other than the mathematics itself. I never heard it any other way. From simple "head and shoulders" to all the nth-order stuff, they take their market as a black box, it seems.

As a follow on to what I just said, in my email box I have a note and link to Robert Prechter's service, The Elliott Wave Theorist, that says the Dow will put in a high today that will last years and that a gigantic crash and economic depression is imminent. This can serve as a real time test of one of the most famous technicians' analyses. (Through the years he has had his share of both home runs and whiffs, but the home runs have been home runs. I sold the family house in Southern California in 2006, in part based on his call, although it was certainly my prediction as well. We know how that worked out.) I know of no fundamental analyst who is saying anything at all like this. In fact recent surveys show near unanimity that the so-called recovery will continue and grow stronger. Let's see who is right.

I traded or supervised traders who traded virtually every tradeable commodity and financial instrument, so like you, I don't get excited about the ebb and flow of prices. What is concerning about China, however, and the point I am trying to raise, is that both their "legimate" and shadow banking systems are houses of cards, and rehypothication may well be what knocks them over. State directed credit systems, and their inevitable concomittant black market credit systems (shadow banking) work no better than any other type of state directed economic activity.

As for technical trading, in so far as it attempts to determine the ebb and flow of emotion in markets, I think it is valid. I never paid much attention to fundamentals when I traded (and I did very well), only emotion, because the fundamentals are always backwards looking. I never saw a fundamental analyst correctly call a big turn in any market, while simple technical indicators were often quite useful in doing just that. Nothing is perfect, but trading is a crowd based, emotional phenomenon and any strategy that ignores that is doomed to failure. I saw markets react directly opposite to what the "fundamentals" would imply so many times, especially at big market turning points, that to follow them would have led to bankruptcy. In fact, one of the best market signals is when markets react opposite to what the "fundamentals" would suggest.

There is a difference between open market trading (actual orders to buy or sell now at market price) and futures trading (promises to buy or sell at a specified date in the future).
What the zero hedge graph is showing is futures contract trading over 5 days, wherein the price fell from 3.17 to 3.03 (4.4%). To a speculator, I imagine this is nothing. I won't go as far as to say the futures market has NO bearing on the open market, but it's definitely muted. To get an idea, go to finance.yahoo.com and pull up a 6 month graph on JJC. A better headline would be "Is copper's three month recovery run coming to an end?"

Here's what I confess I do not understand. If there has been a belief that the commodity warehouses were filled with copper and now we find out they are not, how can there be wholesale liquidations going on? If everyone is scrambling to get the commodity we know know isn't there in the quantity we originally thought, shouldn't the price be going up? And just how much copper comes from China anyway? Another article zerohedge links to says the port in question is the 7th largest in the world, which is another way of saying "not that big".

Nonsense! If the price of copper collapsed, wire manufacturers would stock up because we live in an electric world. Copper mining is a driver for silver, which is only a by-product of that. Even if all the CARRIERS were glass or microwaves, the motors all still need windings. (Shutting off the motor, now THAT would be something...)

This is just hype. The change in price is within a narrow range. The price fell dramatically back in Feb/March but has recovered. All commodities do this for one reason or another. Speculators take losses so that primary users can plan forward. Check the charts:
http://www.kitcometals.com/charts/copper...

I note also, that if warehouse legerdemain caused the price to FALL as traders sell off to cover their positions, then, when the central bank shenanigans with GOLD are revealed, the price of gold will collapse... or so it would seem.

Myself, technical trading is fine if you like to amuse yourself with astrology. I keep to the fundamentals. We know how much copper (or gold) is in the Universe. Even if you could convert all free energy (suns without inhabited planets; dark energy, etc., etc.) into gold (or copper), it would be finite. Human invention is not so constrained: the presence of a hand-axe did not predict the marginal utility of the computer.

Commodity prices change because speculators take losses. That is all that speculators are good for. They eat losses so that primary producers and users can plan forward. Gold mines, wheat farmers, lumber harvesters, lard renderers, they all take buy/sell put/call long/short positions - both sides of every trade - because that reduces risks (inevitable production accidents, natural calamities, labor problems...). Speculators try to out-guess the market. They buy into their hopes and sell into their miseries.

My guess straight is that it would only be a matter of time before this hammers our economy as well.