By Dan Norcini

Dear Friends;

The following is a series of headline alerts and a stories that came down my wire this AM. The reason I have included them is to reinforce what we have been saying about  CHART PAINTING . You would be a bit surprised to learn that I receive emails from people out there who categorically deny such a thing is possible or that it even occurs in the US markets. They condescendingly assert that our claims about the tactics of the short sellers, both in the Comex gold arena and in the stocks, is merely a case of sour grapes from a frustrated bull. That is na ve at best and just plain ignorant at worst.

While this story deals with the oil market, the tactics employed are identical and reasons behind them are the same in all cases. Why is that? Because today s markets are dominated by technicians who pride themselves on having no fundamental view whenever they approach a market but claim that all that is necessary to make money is a knowledge of technical analysis. Some of them actually go so far as to boast about their ignorance of the markets that they trade and revel in the fact that they could care less!

We have maintained that those who have no fundamental view are rudderless ships on the ocean of the trading floors. They can be easily blown about by every wind of price behavior. When prices move lower during a price retracement in a bull market, they become morosely bearish. When prices move higher, they are wildly bullish buying blindly into upside strength. Price action alone dictates what they believe! Since this is now the vast majority of traders/investors, it takes little imagination to understand why chart painting on the close is so important to market manipulation schemes.

It is a fact that the closing price is the most important price in any commodity or stock for that day  session as nearly every single technical price indicator or oscillator uses the closing price in its calculations. Move that strongly in one direction or another, push it as far as possible off the session highs if you are attempting to force price downwards, and all of the technical analysis programs that millions of investors are using will register your efforts. The result is that those software programs then do your work for you as they HERD the INVESTING PUBLIC in the direction you wish them to go.

Manipulation such as is charged above,  banging the closing period , has ONE PURPOSE in mind   to move the closing price in the direction that the perpetrators desire so as to AFFECT THE MAXIMUM technical damage or effect to a market and to psychologically devastate those on the other sides of the trade.

Now do you see why it is necessary when trading gold to understand the tactics of our trading enemies and to also get a grip on your emotions when trading as well as having a firm fundamental view? Once you understand how the game is played you can also spot the tipoffs that alert you to their activities and protect yourselves accordingly. You can also profit accordingly by using the inevitable lemming like response to your advantage.

Dan