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Battle OF The Fibos & The Negative Yield Wall

May 14, 2020

Battle OF The Fibos & The Negative Yield Wall

Fibonacci retracement levels are horizontal lines that indicate where support and resistance are likely to occur. They are based on Fibonacci numbers. Each level is associated with a percentage. The percentage is how much of a prior move the price has retraced. The Fibonacci retracement levels are 23.6%, 38.2%, 61.8%, and 78.6%. While not officially a Fibonacci ratio, 50% is also used. – Investopedia

Traders and ‘bots are clearly in control of this market.

We are fairly convicted the 50% Fibo won’t hold, which sets up a quick move to 50-day moving average at 2721-ish.

944DBA3A-F44D-4D41-B57B-2BE20251FA3A

Source: Carl Quintinalla

Be careful out there, folks, the shorts have been destroyed in the big bounce off the March 23rd bottom and there is very little holding up this market now x/ hope, delusion, and the specter of more financial asset shortages, in our opinion.

Bonds

Moreover, there is little room in yields for bonds to now be used as a stock market hedge or short proxy.

Though it’s possible the trading momo boyz & ‘bots may believe Jerome Powell will take them out of their longs at -2.0 percent, we have our doubts as it will create a real problem for the Fed and Treasury.

It’s [negative interest rates] an unsettled area. I know that there are fans of the policy, but for now, it’s not something we’re considering. We think we have a good toolkit, and that’s the one we’ll be using.” – Chairman Powell, May 13th

Though the Chairman was likely referring to only policy interest rates, it is not clear that if traders pushed U.S. notes and bond yields into negative territory the Fed would be there to buy as part of their QE program.  If they do, imagine the shit show this would cause with the monthly Treasury auctions.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Stop Blaming Russian Bots For Everything

March 5, 2018

Stop Blaming Russian Bots For Everything

“I’m not convinced on this bot thing,” said one of the men behind the Russian bot thing.

BuzzFeed News; Getty Images

By now you know the drill: massive news event happens, journalists scramble to figure out what’s going on, and within a couple hours the culprit is found — Russian bots.

Russian bots were blamed for driving attention to the Nunes memo, a Republican-authored document on the Trump-Russia probe. They were blamed for pushing for Roy Moore to win in Alabama’s special election. And here they are wading into the gun debate following the Parkland shooting. “[T]he messages from these automated accounts, or bots, were designed to widen the divide and make compromise even more difficult,” wrote the New York Times in a story following the shooting, citing little more than “Twitter accounts suspected of having links to Russia.”

This is, not to mince words, total bullshit.

The thing is, nearly every time you see a story blaming Russian bots for something, you can be pretty sure that the story can be traced back to a single source: the Hamilton 68 dashboard, founded by a group of respected researchers, including Clint Watts and JM Berger, and currently run under the auspices of the German Marshall Fund.

But even some of the people who popularized that metric now acknowledge it’s become totally overblown.

“I’m not convinced on this bot thing,” said Watts, the cofounder of a project that is widely cited as the main, if not only, source of information on Russian bots. He also called the narrative “overdone.”

The dashboard monitors 600 Twitter accounts “linked to Russian influence efforts online,” according to its own description, which means the accounts are not all directly traced back to Kremlin efforts, or even necessarily to Russia. “They are not all in Russia,” Watts said during a phone interview last week.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Big Bot Conspiracy

February 23, 2018

The Big Bot Conspiracy

Bots. Is there anything they can’t do?

The Internet Research Agency indictment accuses a troll bot farm of trying to influence the election in what the media claims is the worst attack on America since Pearl Harbor. 9/11 need not apply.

Bots are everywhere.

“Bots Are Trying to Help Populists Win Italy’s Election,” claims Bloomberg. “Russian Bots Are Using 2016 Tactics to Hijack the Gun Debate,” shrieks Vanity Fair. ABC spins that bots are trying to make Black Panther look bad. “Rampaging Twitter ‘bots’ bred in Suffolk farmhouse,” the London Times asserts.

This media madness might make you think that bots are some sort of new and advanced technology. But you can see them in the comments and they’ve been around forever. Automated programs that log into social media accounts are not a new technology. Internet users of a bygone era remember seeing them in chat rooms and on bulletin boards without ever rampaging around Suffolk farmhouses.

Bots have become a convenient media scapegoat. The new formula is “Bots + Thing We Disagree With = Proof We’re Right”. That’s why there are stories claiming that Russian bots are tweeting against gun control or Islamic migration. And it explains the “Russian Bots Rigged the Election for Trump” meme.

Bots are an informational technique. Media spin reverse engineers the technique to discredit the idea. Not only is that a fallacy, but bots just piggyback on popular trends to gain influence. Russian bots don’t tweet about gun control because they care about guns, but because they get retweeted. The same was true of the bots promoting Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump. There are a million brands doing the same thing with bots and influencers. But that’s okay because they push politically correct messages.

And that’s the bot double standard.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Russian Bots, Corporate Sovereigns, Facebook and the Fall of the Republic

October 12, 2017

Russian Bots, Corporate Sovereigns, Facebook and the Fall of the Republic

So we’re told Russia spent a hundred grand on Facebook ads. Some money into Instagram’s pocket from the Muscovite Bear, too. Leaving aside for the moment the relative paucity of alleged Kremlin social-media-based influence peddling (considered against the billions in Super PAC and dark money spent in the last election cycle), and the fact that to my knowledge nobody has even attempted to concretely demonstrate the Russian state’s role in the purchase of these ads, this newest “foreign meddling” flap does raise some genuine questions about the security of American democratic institutions. But not necessarily those that the pundits and the policymakers want our eyes on.

To combat the “Russian ads,” Senators Amy Klobuchar (Minn.) and Mark R. Warner (Va.) have introduced a bill (which is often what American legislators do when there’s a national security issue, unless, of course, that issue is recurrent, gun-related massacres of U.S. citizens by other, white, U.S. citizens). This bill would essentially demand that social media companies disclose the identity of those who spend more than $10,000 in aggregate for political ads on their respective sites. So far, so good, as this type of oversight already exists for broadcast media, and it seems like extending it to the internet is a no-brainer for a marginally functioning democracy. There’s also a provision in the bill that requires social media outlets make a “reasonable effort” to determine if their political ad buyers are foreign nationals or governments. Again, this seems a matter of course for legislation like this, as it’s already illegal for foreign entities to spend money on U.S. elections. But a problem arises if you stop to consider what actually defines foreignness (and, for that matter, domesticity) in our neoliberal age’s hyper-integrated, transnational political economy.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

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