GLIMPSE OF THE FUTURE?

After the massive power outage yesterday here in San Diego hit, it got me to thinking a little bigger picture. I am sure and would actually bet my life on it, that we will never get the straight story about how both the north to south and east to west power links to this area "mysteriously" were severed at the same time. I am also sure "they" know exactly what happened. It really does not matter, but one thing I heard on the radio as I was stranded in a mess like what is picture above, caught my attention.

People with medical problems were obviously being taken to hospitals, since their home apparatus was not functioning without electricity. The Palomar hospital had back generators as you would expect, but here is what I did not expect. Those generators are only good for 96 hours! This means that if a power failure lasts more than 4 days...........it is lights out literally. I had run out during the afternoon and was coming home when it hit. Once I got stuck and my wife was also stuck, we had to figure out how one of us would get home before dark to feed the animals. Doing it in the dark out at the barn was going to be very challenging. I actually was closer to home, about 5 miles. I decided to just pull my car off the road, park it and get out and walk home. I am a fitness guy but I had work closes and had to carry a computer and a few other things, so running was off the table. I did not want to leave the computer in the car, at that point we did not know how bad this was going to be. In a severe situation, looting would happen, and I did not some dumb ass stealing my computer and having access to what is on it, so I grabbed it and started hoofing.

I live in the hills on a ranch to it took me awhile to get home, I barely made it by dusk. All of this made me realize how unprepared we are for something really big if it hits. I have extra food and water tucked away in one of the structures on my property in the event of something like this going on for a bit, but very few people do. Maybe some people cannot afford to stash some things, but you need to somehow find a way. In the event of something either terror or economic related, that causes a big disruption, we could easily be on our own for months, yet a few days and many people would be toast. Lesson, get prepared, and hope it never happens. I have been procrastinating on backup generators due to the expense, no MAS. Once the frenzy for them dies down that will inevitably ensue here, I am getting that done.

Being in the dark last night I missed the speech fortunately, and as I said before, even though we are imploding here, it is not due to that speech or anything he might have said that he did not. We are in a downtrend, we had a bounce, now we are resuming the trend. I did catch on my Blackberry that Mark Zandi was thrilled with the speech and what a great solution it was. I love to be on the opposite side of a trade from him. That tells me all I need to know, if he owned a funeral parlor nobody would die. It seems to be just more spending, and as I said before as per what we are seeing today, these guys are good for business. As they say in the hood, "you go girl." Just keep spending and I will keep shorting things, fine by me. They may not have triggerred today specifically, but their overall plan is putting us here.

You can see in the above chart where I shorted the S&P 500 last night, this is a trade I have been waiting on for some time as readers know. I had mentioned over and over that I thought this was going to be hard to catch, and it was. This was not an ideal entry, especially with the prospect of no power and no live quotes. Nonetheless, we had a lower short term high, the last signal in the Synthetic COT was a sell, the weekly trend was down, it really could not have been more obvious. I know some others were looking the other way, and for all I knew they could have been right. I just follow my own analysis techniques since I am responsible ( there is a novel concept ) for my results. Some others need to read that memo since they obviously have not.

Here is Copper, one of the other markets I pointed out, and it is crashing today along with other things. This chart might as well be the ES, they are nearly identical. The sell entry point is indicated on the chart.

Net net, it is time to be on the short side in most things other than the DX and potentially Natural Gas next week. There are a few others, but you get the point, it is mostly a short sided trade across the board here.

Have a good weekend.