Fundamentals haven't changed, page-246

Couple of points.

"Aleppo is not even important to crude oil price and definitely ignored with any safe haven buying. We can all see where logics dictate but it is not happening in the real world. Either my analysis is wrong or the world is in not such a worse case scenario. I tend to agree with the latter."

You don't have to have just got back from Europe, like I have, to know that the war in Syria and the refugee problems from not just Syria, but elsewhere in the world, feeds into all sorts of political threads in Europe at the moment. Threads like the ultra right and other more extreme politics which are fundamentally destabilising to the status quo of the system. They might like to keep it quite but the US has commandoes on the ground in Iraq and they are taking casualties and asking for more resources. This will be one of the first tests for Chump to see how he influences the course of these wars in the middle east. Frankly I don't hold out much hope that he is the man for the that job.

Unlike you who likes to live by the buzz words of the markets and thinks gold is just another commodity, history has proved over and over again that markets become irrelevant when the affairs of men turn to war. Gold has financed wars through out history and commodities are the raw material of wars.

The interconnectedness of the cash flowing through markets of which you speak just represents another big risk as far as I can see as the technology provides the mechanism for instability which can ultimately drive markets down faster when it becomes evident that true pricing in a crucial part of the system can't be established with enough certainty. You can only suspend trading so many times, while business news wires go into overdrive to try and maintain order.

You keep propagating the notion that there is a continuing bull market in equities and I'm somehow missing some big opportunity. If you know of a big opportunity in another sector with another few years of steam in it please tag me in as I'd like to research such an opportunity (and I'm serious, please let me know). For me 34 failed attempts by the S&P500 at breaking through the 2100 level seems a little inconsistent with that idea, what do you think? You're good with charts, apparently, maybe you can count the exact number of times this index has oscillated through that price point, so you can confirm to others that I'm not making this stuff up.

I made a bet with Skol recently about this exact point, that I won.

You say "Throw in the Trump factor and we now have a changed in fundamental dynamics. Markets are front running his ability to "Make America great again" and I am not going to get in the way of that momentum".

You seem to have a lot of confidence in the strength of the momentum of the Chump speech and equities in general. Why don't we pit your confidence based on your charts against my pessimism based on what I see around me in the markets and the world.

How would you feel about making the same bet that I made with Skol (which he was too chicken to take the other side of). That is if the US S&P500 stays above 2100 until Xmas day I'll stop posting on Hot Copper and if it falls below 2100 before Xmas day then you stop posting? This time around I have far less time so you should feel confident that you will win and see the back of me with your gung-ho, let's rally around the Chump's American dream speech momentum on your side.

That's only approx. 30 trading days!!! If your crystal ball doesn't go out that far you are truly a bad reader of markets as you must rely on timing markets at time scales of less than a month.

Any econo-poltical-macro factor that doesn't have a 30 day reach over markets is truly irrelevant in my opinion and like I said before, the same is true for FA's on a stock like NST. I think the Chump's speech won't even have this modest amount of reach.

So what do you say, do we have a bet? Eshmun