Yesterday, in the midst of bumping up my bearish exposure from 50% to 100%, I shorted two stocks from a sector for which I have ceaseless contempt: cruise companies. I didn’t even realize the bigger one, RCL, was reporting this morning, but it has done so, and with good results for me. Here’s what, umm, “Royal” Caribbean is doing:
Its competitor, Caribbean Cruise Lines (“The Section 8 of the Seas“) is falling in sympathy:
Perhaps an industry based on letting obese people shove endless amounts of food into their cake holes while briefly distracting themselves from their tormented lives by sitting on their corpulent asses in a floating motel is starting to lose its luster. Just a guess.
More broadly speaking, equities are at lifetime highs (again) although small caps, which I am short by way of IWM, is having more of a struggle. The /RTY futures got a sugar-spike on Friday morning (thanks to the CPI, which wants you to believe inflation is only 3%) and then on Monday morning (thanks to the Trump Asia trip, which wants you to believe things are going to be just peaches and cream for global trade henceforth). This morning, /RTY has already shrugged off the entirety of the Asia mega-spike.
It is still in an unbroken uptrend since April 7th, however, and it needs to break the trendline to cause any doubt to enter the understandably arrogant heads of the bulls.
As for precious metals, I’m relived to see they continue to take a drubbing. As of the composition of this post, gold futures are down 2% and palladium futures are down over 3%. Wouldn’t it be just picture perfect if /GC fell to that apex? That feels about right to me!
Palladium, which I’d like to acquire in bulk at a cheap price, has broken support, which is great news. The chart is a tougher read than gold, but I’m relying on gold to indicate to me when palladium’s fall will be over. I am hoping and thinking it’s still weeks away, yet I nervously watch /PA morning, noon, and night.
What I’m trying to conjure up is an attribute in desperately short supply in my personality, which is patience. Let us remember that the last time palladium sunk from a peak, it took about 40 days to do so (arrow). I will continue to monitor this closely, but I’m glad I’ve swatted away the temptation lately to start to buy into this.
I am entering the day with 16 short positions (which is still pretty light for me, since I top out at about 30 or so), since there is still an abundant amount of uncertainty this week. Today might be dead boring, but from mid-Wednesday through the close on Friday should be unchecked pandemonium, since we’ve got our penultimate FOMC for 2025 as well as a few companies you might have heard about………
