Worst. Sunday. Ever.

Yesterday was one of the scariest days of my life. I somehow managed to pull my lower back again – it’s been a chronic ailment that has intermittently affected me over the past 27 years. It usually goes away after a day or two of rest, ice, and pain killers. So business as usual, right? Take it easy for a bit and then get on with life. Yup, until yesterday that is.

I got up early after a rough night, due to the pain, and started to get ready in the bathroom. Suddenly things turned from bad to worse as I started to feel my lower back tighten up with a spasm while a wave of pure pain shot through my lower right sacrum. I could barely stand and immediately tried to get to my Aeron chair in the office (back support and all). Which is right next to my bathroom and literally four meters away. But I didn’t even manage to get that far and ended up propping myself up against the door jam, desperately attempting to relieve the pain.

Welcome To A World Of Hurt

From there things went from bad to much worse as the pain only intensified. I was feeling cold sweat all over and must have howled out loud, as my wife woke up and came running to see what was going on. Quite frankly I had never felt this much pain in my entire life before, and you some of you know I’ve been studying martial arts for decades. Getting kicked and punched in the face and having my nose broken was a walk in the park compared to this.

I actually started to lose it and realized that I was about to pass out. The pain was simply excruciating but what really freaked me out was that I suddenly started to see a glowing ball of light in front of my eyes while my peripheral vision started to get dark. It felt like as if I was going blind. I yelled ‘I can’t see – I can’t see’ and at the same time I had trouble breathing.

Of course my poor wife was freaking out and later told me that she had been propping me up while my eyes were glazing over. We somehow made it to my chair, where I managed to assume a less painful position leaning against my desk until the ambulance arrived a whopping hour later (that’s Spain for you). The poor guys had to carry me down the stairs in a special chair and from there they dumped me into the ambulance and off we went to the hospital.

Once there they put me on a pain drip of intravenous paracetamol and some opoid which helped quite a bit after a few hours of rest. Obviously they took some x-rays which fortunately seemed fine. Eventually I was able to stand and walk again (carefully) and they sent me back home. My personal diagnosis, at least until I see my trauma specialist, is a pinched nerve or a torn ligament, because that’s exactly how it felt.

Humbling

I’ve never felt this helpless in my entire life and it was a very scary and humbling experience. Not one I hope I will ever have to live through again. I have no idea how people managed to deal with something like this back in the day before the onset of modern medicine and especially powerful analgesics. Better living through chemistry! Anyone who proclaims that they would not ever take pain killers or anesthetics in their life has clearly never felt pain like this before. It’s completely debilitating and it cuts through you like a hot knife through butter.

On The Mend

I’m somewhat on the mend today but still walk like I’m 110 years old. Everything slows down to a crawl, even getting out of bed in the morning takes several minutes. Bathroom visits turn into carefully choreographed procedures geared towards avoiding pain. My wife is taking very good care of me and I’m alternating between anti-inflammatories, ice packs, and even topical DMSO, which is something my wife has experience with. It makes you smell like a garlic clove but is a great alternative treatment to just popping pain killers.

Obviously I’m going to have to take it easy for a day or two, but am in good enough shape to do a quick run down of some of our key markets. After all I already made you put with 100 pages of my incessant whining. So let’s do it!

The bulls are back in the game as equities are now pushing into new all time highs. As I’m typing this the E-Mini was scraping 2888, which also is a new record. Obviously we are well positioned here and I’m now advancing my trail to 0.5R.

I’m actually long the ZB bond futures since last week. My general perspective when sharing the entry with my subs was the it’s a slow moving market best served for accumulation.

Gold actually drew me into a short position last week and I got promptly kicked out. Which is sort of annoying as it now looks like as if it may be painting a medium term low.

Corn is two strikes away from falling into Hades. If you’re a short trader then this is a nice market to follow right now. I don’t currently see an entry opportunity but am keeping it on my watch list.

Crude is looking increasingly bullish and a push > the 70 mark completely changes the ball game in that it may trigger a push to new highs for the year. At the same time a drop < 66 puts it back in the slow gear churn mode. Clearly a lot of that depends also on the Dollar, which I’m covering below.

Soybeans look like they may fall off the plate here. However looks often can be deceptive and if it manages to defend the current spike low at 827.75 I may be a buyer. So when would we know? If it manages to turn here and push beyond 880.

Okay, so let’s talk about that Dollar. Looking pretty damn droopy there and I think we may see it retest its 100-week SMA or even drop back to the 94 cluster of NLSLs.

My long campaign in the USD/JPY is obviously benefitting and I’ve advanced my trail to 0.3. As it’s heading lower this is a good compromise between locking in some gains and keeping it in the run if it manages to continue the advance over the rest of this week.

Long term it’s still stuck in the proverbial rut and only a push > 112 puts it back onto the bull(et) train. Get it  – Yen on a bullet train? Okay, I’m on a lot of pain killers, cut me some slack 😉

My Euro campaign is pissing me off by continuing to do very well. For now I’m keeping my trail at 1.0R.

Long term I am seeing a pretty convincing looking spike low on the monthly panel. Which looks bullish as heck to me. But then my wife popped by and I asked what she was seeing (as we always need to time our ATM runs). She pointed out that massive inverse H&S pattern on the weekly and I may just have to hand over the blog to her now.

Now you know why I married the women. Plus she’s gorgeous as well, so there’s that. But she’s got a good point and I’m starting to see a binary inflection point in the range between 1.18 and 1.13. A breach on either end is expected to accelerate the prevailing medium term trend.

I’ve got one more special goody for my intrepid subs:

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