Middle East Chaos


The Middle East has been in turmoil and Trump has stood his ground against the neo-cons. The UAE is trying to avoid involving its nation in the conflict with Iran and certainly sees no upside to turning its country into a battlefield between the US and Iran. Iran promised to talk to the Yemeni officials to avoid hitting targets in Dubai and Abu Dhabi, provided the UAE pulls out its forces from Yemen. The so-called “deal of the century” proposed by President Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, which sought to deal with the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, was met with minimal interest. The $50 billion in aid to the Palestinians was view as just a bribe.

Meanwhile, Trump has been thwarting the neo-cons for he came out opposing their policies, stating with respect to Iran: “We’re not looking for regime change. We want them out of Yemen.” Those unfamiliar with the players in the Middle East should read our report on the region – The War Cycle.

Cycles, Einstein & Galileo – Geometry of Time


QUESTION: Mr. Armstrong; It has dawned on me studying Einstein’s General Relativity, that the two of you reached the same realization from different fields. Newton’s laws of gravity were turned upside down by Einstein who rejected Newton that there was a linear formation to space. Einstein came up with the fact that space was curved and that time and space were linked so that time was not the same throughout the universe. In reading the few chapters on the Geometry of Time you handed out at I think was the 2011 WEC, your entire process is also linking the curvature and time albeit from a different observation than Einstein.

Would you elaborate?

GDM

ANSWER: According to Einstein’s theory of general relativity, massive objects warp the spacetime around them, and the effect a warp has on objects is what we call gravity. So, locally, spacetime is curved around every object with mass. However, what led Einstein to his discovery was the question of free fall. Before I had ever ready Einstein, I was probably about 12 years old and I fell out of a tree and over a cliff falling probably a couple of hundred feet. I was lucky and it was Fall so at the base of the cliff was a mountain of leaves. The leaves broke my fall but my teeth nearly came through my bottom lip. The wind was knocked out of me and my nose was bleeding. I went to my friend’s house nearby and finally got my nose to stop bleeding. I kept tasting blood. I opened my mouth and saw the injury and only then did it start to hurt. It was a good 30 minutes. I went to the hospital and they stitched me up.

Two things dawned on me that day. First, I asked why did my mouth not hurt until I saw I was insured? Secondly, when I was falling, I did not feel like a dead weight, but I felt like I was flying – weightless.

Because of that incident, I came to realize that there was some truth to the saying what you do not know, can’t hurt you. But it also gave me insight into what Einstein was talking about. In the middle of a free fall, you feel weightless as if gravity has canceled itself out. Actually, Aristotle first tried to reason that a heavy object will fall faster than a light object in a free fall. He was incorrect. Galileo was the first to actually get it right. He realized that a falling body picked up speed at a constant rate.Galileo also made the observation that in a vacuum, all bodies fall with the same acceleration. That was a truly astonishing idea. That experiment was carried out on the moon with a hammer and a feather. They both fell to the ground at the same time.

Yes, these things influenced me in seeing what I called the Geometry of Time in how and why do trends unfold and what are their durations? Was there a constant force at work, or were there patterns of time within time? This is an extremely complex subject. Far too much for a blog post. I will publish that work in 2020.

 

Understanding the Energy Model


 

QUESTION: Hi Marty

I try not to bother you with questions, I know you’re plenty busy answering much more complex questions but I’m wondering if you could explain energy in the markets a bit?

I always watch for divergences in energy and price (both positive and negative), or fading energy during a rally, or a random jump in energy during a consolidation period but I can’t stop thinking about your last private blog where it can’t crash if the energy is negative… so only if it’s peaking? So should someone be cautious if the energy starts getting high? Does that also mean if it’s negative it has more potential to swing to the upside?

Here on bitcoin energy peaked after price peaked, which leaves me confused again, what does that mean? And both Bitcoin and Netflix and others I’ve found had a panic to the upside when the energy went negative, is this more of a rule, or are these exceptions?

And the million dollar question, are there other things I should be watching when it comes to energy? I’m sure there is still much I don’t know

Thank you,
NS

ANSWER:  The Energy Model is measuring the bulls against the bears. It is providing a different measurement of how much “energy” remains in the market from the long-side. Therefore, if people are recently long, i shows to what extent that represents the whole of the market position. A crash is possible when energy is at a high level and a rally is likely when energy is negative.

In the case of Bitcoin, the market failed to make a new high with the new high in energy. That was the divergence warning that this was a top. In Netflix, the market was bottoming and the energy turned negative. Again, because the energy was negative, that effectively means the liquidation is over. It is impossible to get a panic crash without energy still in the positive. The risk will be to the upside when the energy is negative.

Now, let’s look at the Dow. You can see that energy bottomed negative three weeks from the breakout. This, again, warned there would be no crash as everyone was predicting. The Energy Indicator is an excellent tool in judging the risk in a market from a purely numerical perspective — not opinion.