mmerlin,
what do you base your predictions on ?
If its TA, is it reliable in a managed market ?
I guess theres no reason why the controllers cant 'paint the tape' to create the appearance of human behaviour but if the real battle is paper vs metal, does TA still work ?
I base my predictions on 40 years of earning my living in the rough and tumble scrap markets. Basically, I eat or starve by how I view the markets, so even though I am not correct all of the time, my predictions are spot on enough to put food on the table in any kind of market, whether sky-rocketing, crashing, or just going boringly sideways.
Crashing markets are the best for me. I make more money when markets are wildly crashing than when they are going up. Basically, the crashing markets bankrupt or scare out the competitors who generally never come back, leaving me with bigger slices of the pie. Rising markets, especially rocketing ones, bring a new crop of competitors out of the woodwork who see the easy money, but have not been baptized in a crashing inferno, and who eventually lose their shirts when the inferno happens.
To put it simply, I am a stacker when everyone else is abandoning my markets. I stack new suppliers and regain old suppliers, many of which were burnt by my competitors during the slide in prices. Those suppliers generally are very loyal and ignore all competing offers in the next runup thereby giving me a stable supplier base with wide margins as prices go up. Over time during the runup the supplier base shrinks as suppliers sell out, die, or otherwise leave the business. By the time the next top comes, my supplier base is small as potential new suppliers are enticed by prices offered by my new competitors, prices which I refuse to match because it is pointless to get into a bidding war with competitors that have no clue how to survive the ups and downs of the markets.
The whole cycle takes about 10 years from bottom to top to bottom again. With metals prices crashing, I have been stacking new suppliers and regaining suppliers that could not live with my prices during the last five years. When this crash is all over and done with, I should have a decent supplier base for the next five years or so, until the next batch of not-yet-dry-behind-the-ears competitors arrives.
Even though I am not stacking physical metals, I am still a stacker when prices are falling. I stack new suppliers which supply me the metals I need to put food on the table.
After 40 years of surviving in the metals markets, one gets a "feel" for prices and price actions. It really does not matter if the markets are "controlled" or not as no one, not even the government, can repeal the laws of economics. All they can do is to distort the markets, making for higher highs and lower lows and increasing the velocity of those changes. If the government would get out of the economic arena, we would still have ups and downs in the markets, but market forces would force those ups and downs to be much shorter and less wild in their gyrations.