Ferris & Thread: Rare rainy day in WV. So, suddenly there's time for a conceptual post. Hope it has merit and pulls some of everyone's tea leaves together.
Ferris, UR right. I think dead and semi-comatose SI threads is part of a much larger secular socio-economic pattern about which even a lengthy post can only offer only a brief perspective.
First, it's noteworthy that a number of SI top 15 most book marked threads have seen declines in their post counts, to very lo levels, over the past year, vs the past 5 or more years. For brevity, I've listed only the 3 most dramatic examples, besides what we've seen on NRS.
However, even the most cursory of examinations quickly reveals several other top 15ers R struggling to sustain even 1/2 page/day. Not long ago, these hosted one, two, or more pages every day.
The first 2 have ranked higher than NRS, for years:
Subject 54696
Subject 54034
Subject 55751
This posting plunge is consistent with a large and continuing public exodus from stock investing, folks.
The vast majority of stock market participants are LT or very LT investors. The chart below is one of a long list that helps explain why they've been leaving stocks vs other investment alternatives:
businessinsider.com
Another is the perception that the market is increasingly rigged and manipulated for the benefit of an unaccountable predatory elite:
We all know it pays to use contrarian thinking. OTOH, the major movement out of stocks, and the concomitant decline in broad market liquidity, in the past 6 months to date, is unprecedented after 18 months of Bull Market!
zerohedge.com
To further flesh out this very important trend here are two recent Zero Hedge articles. The 2nd appeared today:
zerohedge.com
zerohedge.com
IMO, what are clearly unprecedented historic circumstances require us to move beyond a knee jerk application of contrarian thinking.
Yes, the broad stock indices can go higher from here. Neverthless, it's obvious from the above that the rise of the past 6 months isn't coming from investors. It's being engineered by the FED and PPT to put rouge on the cheeks of this corpse we call an economy before the election.
How bout a quick look at flat or even declining volume in key stocks during this most recent rally phase?
The list is a very long one. For brevity sake, I'm listing just three examples from as many, widely differing, industries to make the point:
stockcharts.com
stockcharts.com
stockcharts.com
Ordinarily, volume picks up significantly, in September, as fund managers and professional traders in come back from vacation. However, what we seeing instead is flat or even declining volume more characteristic of Summer Doldrums. For those TA mavens among you, this is a bearish non-confirmation of the price movement.
Even after putting all the above pieces together, we're looking at only a small piece of a much larger historic development which is likely to dominate the rest of our lives and those of our children. It is the rapid decline of the global socio-economic empire powered by debt which, although growing slowly at first after WWII, has entered a parabolic, terminal, phase during the past 10 yrs.
Have posted repeatedly about the broader historic precedents of declining empires, over the years, and offered an abbreviated reading list of top shelf historical studies which helped me get my mind around this biggest of big pictures.
Regular thread readers are well acquainted with my views about where we stand vs historic parallels. The two I've referred to in recent years are the rapid decline of the Spanish global empire, in the second half of the 17th Century, and the French Revolution.
Cheers,
Isopatch |
