I’m watching some late night television, I love John Stewart and Steven Colbert.  Frankly, John Stewart has more credibility than MSNBC, CNN, and Fox News combined.  Sadly, you’ll find more real news during this hour of television than you’ll find all day on cable news.   As a writer and performer Steven Colbert is far and away more talented, but watching a dorky self deprecating Jewish guy bash people for a living is just more fun, I’m able to associate much easier.

Both shows had financial journalists as guests tonight, hocking their newest literature.  John Stewart entertained Andrew Ross Sorkin selling his book Too Big to Fail, Steven Colbert with Matt Taibbi talking about his much ballyhooed piece in Rolling Stone on Goldman Sachs.  The tv is entertaining no doubt, but leaves me frustrated.  The shtick that Stewart and Colbert have going is all about bashing classic idiocy and hypocrisy perpetrated by people in power.  But the financial crisis was really the first major go around for these guys in terms of the economic world.  As the crisis developed last year, I can picture both huddling with their writers at some point and saying, “guys, i need all the classic knocks on banks, economists, analysts, the fed, treasury, and anything else i can make fun of, thanks.”

This economic clusterfuck taught us all many lessons for sure, but no one learned more about how to bash everything and anything economic than these two guys.  It’s been entertaining to watch as they felt their way through.  But now it’s starting to become annoying, it’s turned from interesting to watch them learn how badly this financial system is fucked, to sad how they talk about the current system like it used to be all butterflies and fairies.

Not only them, but Sorkin and Taibbi hock their stuff acting like the greed and corruption on Wall Street only became prevalent in the run up to the financial collapse.  Taibbi isn’t as bad as Sorkin, his piece on Goldman Sachs outlined how they have helped to create and profited from many past asset bubbles.  But both still speak like Wall Street used to be a place where our financial system worked for the little guy, the joe schmo.

Look people, Wall Street has never, ever, ever, been in the business of helping the little guy.  The same shenanigans that go on today, happened yesterday, 10 years ago, 100 years ago, and will continue to take place tomorrow.  The only difference are the tools they use to screw you.  Wall Street only cares about America as a whole to the extent that it helps make them money.  I’m convinced that some major players in the short financials game last spring only covered because they were afraid if they didn’t there wouldn’t be much of a market left for them to play in down the road, kind of like what J.P. Morgan said to Jesse Livermore in Reminiscences of a Stock Operator.

I love Stewart and Colbert to death, but if they want to be relevant in the conversation regarding how to fix our financial system, they’ve got to grow up and recognize what motivates and will always motivate Wall Street.  In fact, when they realize that the heart of Wall Street is never going to change, they’ll probably have some really great material to work with.

As for the market, we continue to churn above major support levels.  I still believe we are set to test the all important 50 day moving average.  At the close today, the market was trapped below the 5 and 20 day moving averages which are both moving in the negative direction now.  A failure to recapture this level tomorrow and I believe we could see a break of the trading range into the end of the week.

The fact that we haven’t pulled back more the past few days with the bloodletting in gold and crude is amazing and testament to the fact that there are strong stocks and sectors in this market.  If you are still trading into the end of the year in this chop, you should be focusing on areas of relative strength instead of the averages, there are stocks to be found which are moving out there.  Playing the ranges though seems to be the better trade right now than taking entries on breakouts.

Crude is coming into a major level of support right above the 200 day exponential moving average.  The contango in $CL_F is starting to get ugly though making $USO a sub optimal way to get long energy.  Remember, when $USO has to roll into crude contracts that trade above the spot price, it negatively effects the price of the ETF.  Watch those stochastics for a bounce, they are very oversold.

Gold is getting closer to stopping me out, all be it with large gains.  This is a system trade for me, so I won’t spend time over analyzing it.  I’ll stop out on a violation of that lower yellow 20 day donchian channel.  Interesting though, that level does correspond very closely to the location of the 50 day moving average, coincidence, I think not.  If you don’t have a position in gold and want one, now is the time.  Take your shot with a tight stop.  If you are looking for longer term gold related positions, look more towards gold miners $EGO and $RGLD.