“The mythological Narcissus rejected the advances of the nymph Echo and was punished by the goddess Nemesis. He was consigned to pine away as he fell in love with his own reflection – exactly as Echo had pined away for him. How apt. Narcissists are punished by echoes and reflections of their problematic personalities up to this very day.

Narcissists are said to be in love with themselves. But this is a fallacy. Narcissus is not in love with himself. He is in love with his ‘reflection’…

In the narcissist’s surrealistic world, even language is pathologized. It mutates into a weapon of self-defence, a verbal fortification, a medium without a message, replacing words with duplicitous and ambiguous vocables.

When narcissism fails as a defense mechanism, the narcissist develops paranoid narratives: self-directed confabulations which place him at the center of others’ allegedly malign attention.”

Sam Vaknin, Malignant Self Love: Narcissism Revisited

“There’s a reason narcissists don’t learn from mistakes and that’s because they never get past the first step which is admitting that they made one. It’s always an assistant’s fault, an adviser’s fault, a lawyer’s fault.  Ask them to account for a mistake any other way and they’ll say, ‘what mistake?”

Jeffrey Kluger, The Narcissist Next Door

Gold and silver managed to nudge up a little tighter into the overhead resistance at 1166 gold and 16+ for silver.

The Bucket Shop was dead quiet on precious metal deliveries yesterday. No surprise there. And no surprise that the bullion continues to slowly leak out of the warehouses as shown in the reports below.

There was intraday commentary on a remarkable spike in an indicator that in the past has presaged significant stock market corrections. You may find some value in reading it at Stock Share Risk Measure Rises To Highest Level Ever.

As the Austrian school likes to say about the velocity of money, the risk measure in question, the skew, doesn’t do anything, in much the same sense that the speedometer on your car does not do anything. What it does is provide some information that may prove to be useful, especially when you are heading into a sharp turn at over 100 mph.