Absolute Powell

Hat tip to President Trump for selecting Jerome Powell as our new chairman of the Federal Reserve. Not because of Mr. Powell’s qualifications, mind you, but his last name! Am I seriously the only financial blogger who is excited about the laundry list of click-baiting word games we’ll be able to squeeze out of this?

Now more seriously speaking I know very little about the man. But what I do know is that you couldn’t offer me enough money to take on his job of carefully deflating the inflationary monster bubble that the past two Fed chairmen (what is the plural if it involves a woman?) have created over the past decade.  In case you lost track, as of today U.S. government debt has ballooned to a whopping $20.8 Trillion – give or take a few billion.

How he’s going to do it without wiping out the entire global financial system as we know it is a mystery to me. But we shall soon know more as Mr. Powell is scheduled to address Congress for the first time today at 8:30am Eastern. Not surprisingly financial markets are on high alert for any signals on how quickly Mr. Powell intents to continue raising rates. The Fed had forecast in December that it would raise rates three times in 2018. But many analysts think economic developments might lead it to accelerate that pace.

The E-Mini has leveled off from yesterday’s climb and I’m now moving my stop to < 2753. I was considering to leave it at break/even but if equities suddenly tank then I’ll probably get a shitty fill anyway.

My gold campaign unfortunately got stopped out at break/even overnight. The formation looks bullish as heck but taking entries here ahead of Mr. Powell’s address would be a bit too risky for my taste. If gold can hold its ground for the next few hours then I’d be tempted to give this campaign another shot.

Crude is ticking along nicely and I just advanced my stop to < 63. If it can survive the next two hours then I think we’ll be in good shape here.

Stop out on Litecoin as well with only meager profits. Perhaps I should have held my stop at break/even but hindsight is always 20/20. What’s clear however is that intra-day volatility is a major factor when it comes to trading cryptos in general. Stop ranges need to be generous enough to keep you in the game, especially during the early phase until trending behavior once again kicks in. At this point cryptos across the board are still recovering from the big sell-off and it’ll probably take a while until crazy money returns and results in more directional moves. Unless of course we get another big sell off 😉

FWIW – I do love the formation here on both the ST and daily panels. Once again I may be tempted to jump back in here or perhaps on ETH later today or tomorrow. For now I’m going to hunker down a little see what happens until after Mr. Powell is done addressing Congress.