Tim Knight from Slope of Hope's blog

Originally published on Slope of Hope last month, I thought it was worth bringing over here to ZH....

If you're like most Americans, you hadn't heard of James Stockdale until he showed up for the 1992 Vice Presidential debates and made this famous line.......

There's a very well-known publisher of market commentary which - like me - has been largely bearish over the past two and a half years. What is irksome to me is that, in the face of a market which has done little but push higher all this time, they keep pointing to a chart showing that in "real dollars" (in their view, gold) the market has indeed been crashing.

Ummm, that's stupid. Gold is an asset, but it isn't used as money in our society. Do you buy groceries with it? Pay your mortgage with it? Pay school tuition with it? I didn't think so.

I could make ANY prediction about ANY market and be correct if you allowed me to choose some kind of "currency" as a benchmark. Over any span of time, you can find something which has gone either up or down in value to support your claim, if that's what you're allowed to use as your divisor.

Just for fun - a ratio chart of Apple versus Research in Motion from 2008 to present. It's a stunner.

Most airport book stores are crammed with the very latest business books which promise to make you a better worker at whatever job you've got, guaranteeing you a much bigger salary. ("Good to Great", "Emotional Equations", "Entreleadership", "Switch", and a myriad of other worthless drivel). I was heartened to see Michael Lewis' Boomerang, which is something I knew would interest me. So that's what I bought.

Anyone who has dared question the infinite strength of the Apple juggernaut has had their liver eaten daily by a hawk. (My own view last week that Apple would get a little above $500 then reverse didn't quite work out, although I'm willing to give myself a little wiggle room here). But it really seems to me we are just about at the peak of how high the QQQs are going to be able to go.

As a companion to my post late last month of the GDX via my chicken-scratch, here's another poultry-created masterpiece: a trio of Euro drawings with my best attempt at marking the "matched" points of this analog. The charts speak for themselves. Whether or not this pans out a third time remains to be seen. So far, so good, though.....(as a side note, I originally posted this on Slope of Hope at the end of last month, but the analog still holds - - - what happens this week will either break or affirm it).

Nothing sums up the euphoria these days better than Apple, Inc.