A Wyckoff Student Notebook

Ford broke higher today out of a re-accumulation range. Tentatively holding for awhile longer.

Wyckoff Principle: Cause vs Effect

 

Please pardon me for going off the Wyckoff topic temporarily. I do this because Rustic1 made a post in the Beyond Meat thread that sparked an intense interest and I thought it safer to post my reflection here. Rustic1 said in the Beyond Meat thread:

It is indeed sad we have let politics divide us. I admit, they got me this time, I fell for their left-right psyop this last election cycle, and actually went to the poll and voted for a president, something I haven't done in a long while, having been previously and now again convinced that presidents are selected not elected. I've returned to reality, to the jest-full truth of "A Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy":

Zaphod Beeblebrox's full title was President of the Imperial Galactic Government. The term imperial is kept though it is now an anachronism. The hereditary Emperor is now nearly dead, and has been for many centuries. This is because in his last dying moments he was, much to his imperial irritation, locked in a perpetual stasis field. All his heirs are now of course long dead, and the upshot of all this is that without any drastic upheaval, political power has simply and effectively moved a rung or two down the ladder and is now seen to be vested in an elected governmental assembly, headed by a President elected by that assembly. In fact it vests in no such place. That would be too easy. The President's job--and if someone sufficiently vain and stupid is picked he won't realize this--is not to wield power, but to draw attention away from it. Zaphod Beeblebrox, the only man in history to have made Presidential telecasts from the bath, from Eceentrica Gallumbits' bedroom, from the maximum security wing of Betelgeuse state prison or from wherever else he happened to be at the time, was supremely good at this job.

And to Matt Taibbi's example of this truth in his book "Hate Inc.":

A classic example of how we in the press commoditize division--even in clear and important areas of bipartisan cooperation--involves the passage of this year's $716 billion military appropriations bill. It was a huge bill. The year one increase in Trump's defense budget that passed with overwhelming Democratic cooperation--85-10 in the Senate--was $82 billion, higher than the Iraq War appropriations for either 2003 or 2004. The two-year increase of $165 billion eclipsed the peak of annual Iraq War spending and is also higher than the entire military budget for either China or Russia. Yet what was the story about the defense bill? "Trump signs defense bill, but snubs the senator the legislation is named after--John McCain," was the Washington Post headline. This was before McCain's death. The Post assigned three reporters to this story--three!--and ripped Trump for having "name-checked" four other members of Congress, but not McCain--whom Trump, they wrote, "frequently disparages." They quoted a mortified John Kerry, who seethed: "Disgraceful." This story was picked up by the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, ABC, The Hill, CNN, CBS, the AP, and others. Cindy McCain even tweeted about it.

To recap: Democrats and Republicans spent a year writing themselves a pork-packed Christmas list on the scale of the Iraq invasion, full of monster expenditures, including money for dangerous new forms of nukes. Yet the headline when Trump signed the freaking thing was that he forgot to mention the senator whose name was attached to the legislation. This is the trick. the schism is the conventional wisdom. Making the culture war the center of everyone's universe is job one.

And what was the result of this last election? The entire apparatus of the war on terror directed inwardly on the domestic population, the extremists, the Q-Anoners, the Trump supporters, etc. Let the purity tests and wrong-think tests begin. Of course, this was the design all along and the narrative of the 21st century, use culture war to turn the weapons of the police state against the enemies of the state. Elections change nothing in the overall agenda. I'm out, never again to be snookered by their shenanigans. I'll just work on my own world.

I'll end this stump with the end-note in Hitchhikers's Guide to the Galaxy:

The President in particular is very much a figurehead--he wields no real power whatsoever. He is apparently chosen by the government, but the qualities he is required to display are not those of leadership but those of finely judged outrage. For this reason the President is always a controversial choice, always an infuriating but fascinating character. His job is not to wield power but to draw attention away from it. On those criteria Zaphod Beeblebrox is one of the most successful Presidents the Galaxy has ever had--he has already spent two of this ten presidential years in prison for fraud. Very very few people realize that the President and the government have virtually no power at all, and of these few people only six know whence ultimate political power is wielded. Most of the others secretly believe that the ultimate decision-making process is handled by a computer. They couldn't be more wrong.

 

Time to drag out my S&P 500 E-mini futures Point and Figure again. The base count that started with the dotcom bubble-burst gives a target of 4850. That was confirmed in a re-accumulation range but then the Covid-19 event thwarted the orderly mark up. The counts from the re-accumulation (stepping stone) ranges since then have been reliable and would therefore indicate that the market needs to consolidate, i.e., the big boys need to shake out weak hands and re-accumulate. From this I guess I'm expecting a sideways market for a number of months. Of course I'm always on the look out for excessive supply.

 

Seems like sliver is on the springboard here.

Daily bars:

 

Silver was NOT on the springboard. Fell thru diagonal trendline with low volume.

PLTR is an interesting case study. The shorter term counts have played out and it likely needs to build more cause in here. The counts on the longer term range point to either $75 or $9. Friday it reached a low of 20.18 and closed high range indicating stopping action. I'm thinking that if they are intending to take it higher, there are still a lot of "believers" to shake out and therefore the stops under the 20.18-low will get taken out. However, I'm leaning short on this one depending on the quality of a rally, if any, next week.

Daily bars:


$1-box by 3-box-reversal Point & Figure:

 

TSLA should be done for now and start to build more cause (consolidate). It goes without saying, the trend is down and demand will need to prove itself in the right-hand side of the upcoming trading range.

$10-box by 3-box-reversal Point & Figure:

 

My oil stocks are still performing the best. Bought XOM at just over a10% dividend yield. The current yield is 5.71%, still nothing to sneeze at.

 

Thinking about adding to my RAVN holdings. The point and figure count gives a target of $75. Raven Industries is the company credited as the inventor of the modern hot air balloon and now big in the precision agriculture space. I told a co-worker of mine, who has a side gig of farming a few thousand acres, that I owned Raven and he told me that the Raven control system on his Case sprayer ($250k machine) is the best , better than the Trimble systems on his tractors.

 

Audiobook of a series of Richard Wyckoff interviews of Jesse Livermore published in Wyckoff's publication, "The Magazine of Wall Street". There are a lot of recognizable gems in this especially if you are familiar with Wyckoff's methods as Livermore influenced him heavily.

 

As for the case study on PLTR, at 30 minutes before the closing bell, it looks bearish, sellers appeared on upthrust. The down-sloping brown line is the 20-day SMA.

 

Ford continues to grind higher. Just being vigilant for large supply to appear as it approaches the new-cause projection of 14.25.

 

Did not get order in to add to RAVN holdings...work got in the way. However, I may have another chance. Today it closed at 40.80, a dime under the top of that selling bar at 40.90. But it did close above the buying bar with top at 40.57. Overall it remains bullish as that selling bar did not have quality (big boy) volume/supply.

 

^ Yep, that's an Allis, but just for the record, I'm not that old. Back when I was a kid following Allis Chalmers from the newspaper quotes in the early 70s one of my uncles had an Allis WD which at that time was principally used to grind feed, but what a cool tractor. That was the reason I followed Allis Chalmers. There gone now, merged with Navistar, and now I see Navistar merged with someone else recently.

 

The case study still looks weak at the 27.66 axis line. Probably a good low risk short if it falls a dime or so below today's low. But it's not for me, my longs are doing fine.

 

Cameco, CCJ, purveyor of uranium was my best performer today. My updated stepping stone count projects to $22 while the longer-term base count projects to $41.