Intermediate tops and the SupermarketDo you ever notice that people in Supermarkets, or stores in general, are rarely smiling? The Supermarkets play happy music, you'd think that would lift a few faces wouldn't you, but we are a solemn lot in there. Most of us know why the music is played, it's to manipulate us, to lift our mood, make us want to buy potato chips and blocks of chocolate and party pies and all the non-foods as well as the real foods which make up an ever decreasing fraction of floor space.
We know there are other manipulations going on too. The store loyalty card that is used to sell us stuff we wouldn't ordinarily buy, but will because it's at a cheaper price.
"Manger's Special, Members only" Then there is the product placement height and the fact that they move the stuff around and around to force us to search and while we're searching, view other product we don't want, but might be tempted to buy now it's in our face. Marketing, the Manipulation of people's (consumers) brains to make more money off them.
If you were to ask a higher up manager what it was all about they would tell you its done so that they can achieve a better
market share than their competition down the road, and there is some truth in that. Originally, back in the day when Supermarkets were busy undercutting the local fruitier and butcher and small hardware stores they were offering you solid product at good savings. But they have pretty much cornered the local market now so they are not competing
for your business, they are basically competing with "You", to get as much money out of your pocket as scientifically possible.
We have 3 supermarket chains here and the prices are so close you'd assume they have all slashed their profit to the bone just to get you in the door. But that's not the case at all, their profits can't be hidden, they are making out like bandits. So that only leaves collusion, the basic cartel arrangement. Hell it's probably legal too, like the banks and their interest rates. The Fed gives them cover to charge as much as humanly possible in a given economic environment and so their rates are always very close to each other's. But that's another story.
Supermarkets and... Financial markets? Could there be any similar strategies employed? I don't mean product placement or gentle mood music, but look at the basic decline pattern of something like Bitcoin, or Nvidea. It doesn't go straight down, that would be unnatural anyway, but why do they often seem to go down in this regular pattern of lower lows and lower peaks. Sure it could be tied to some basic human psychological function but programs do all the work for the most part now. Could it be a natural mathematical process inherent in such programming, with stop losses and buy order triggers? Possibly. But what if, as many say, the financial markets are totally manipulated, which we have good circumstantial evidence for, then what?
If your hodling something like BC and you see a drop you obviously get nervous, then you see it rise back up, and you feel elated. You're on an emotional roller-coaster now and people in such states find it very hard to think rationally. As the market price for your darling declines these intermediate tops give you hope. It's not over yet! It wants to go up, but there is too much fear at the moment, too much
xyz preventing it from breaking through. Once it consolidates, etc etc. A whole wordsalad of financial terms to describe something that should really be quite simple. Is it viable product? What's it's PE ratio, will there be increasing demand for it. 50 years ago these decisions were easy and needed no complex financial (laws).
All the while this whipsaw action is happening hodlers continue to hodl and perhaps buy more, the backbone of the investment. And every now and then this does pay off, like hodling Microsoft shares through the dotcom collapse. But for every Microsoft there are 20 or more pets.com and that's where rational analysis and an unemotional head comes in. Frankly Microsoft was a given since it's software was sold bundled with well over half the computers on the planet. But that was a different era, that was a quarter of a century ago when things were still ok in the world of finances. It was just one bubble, in one sector, and though the fallout was huge it was easily papered over with the housing bubble that followed.
That too was a good bubble, you could have made real money if you got in early and sold before the top (like all bubbles) I knew two men that went into it in a big way in the early 00's. One sold out near the top in 2007, took his profits and bought a place on the Gold Coast and started taking regular trips to Bali (he was a surfer). He basically retired for about 4 years, but then had to go back to work. The other guy held onto a portfolio of 7 properties and lost the lot when interest rates rose. Lost his job with the bank, lost the new trophy wife too. Poor bastard, I met up with him 5 years later, he was sharing house in a dumpy part of town, but he had a PLAN!
That bubble employed an established market, one that wouldn't go away and couldn't collapse below a certain point. No wonder they went at it again this decade, it's a real cash cow. But today nearly everything is being used as a bubble platform and this due to the immense debts underlying the world's (Everything). An established company can't even make payroll in many cases without debt, it's built into every action they take.
Going back to Marketing and market manipulation I see this downward action in the markets like the Crypto's and I say "is it really just natural" or is there a set of hands behind it, driving the price up by buying the lows and then selling off as the tops approach? Big players, Whales where the money involved "for them" is just a small part of their balance sheets. It would easy enough to do, and with crypto there would (wolud) be no fingerprints leading to suspects. Warren Buffett manipulated the Silver market back last century with such a small part of Berkshire Hathaway's balance sheet that it was hidden under "other" investments.
In keeping with Buffett's buy-and-hold policy, the company said it had no immediate plans to unload its silver position, which is worth about $850 million at current market prices and represents less than 2 percent of Berkshire's portfolio. Buffett has amassed the biggest silver position any single individual has accumulated since the Hunt brothers were accused of trying to corner the silver market in 1980, sources said. Nelson Bunker Hunt and William Herbert Hunt bought huge volumes of silver contracts, sending the price soaring, only to lose an estimated $1.3 billion when they started to sell and prices fell from about $50 an ounce to about $10 an ounce in March 1980.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/ ... ec4ede139/
The 'peak oil' story is not over by any means. Fracking was a desperate and ruinous sort of pause, which has been used to crank up demand.
