SunTrader

Yeah, yeah, yeah, blah, blah, blah. Once again in case you forgot - NYC had a 50 YEAR RECORD LOW NUMBER OF MURDERS last year by enforcing all the laws including gun possession, cracking down on both law-abiding citizens (except for having illegal guns) and criminals. As a result there are less, not more guns in NY (city that is) Upstate NY hunters are loaded by bear or commies or whatever they fear.

For those of among us who read things not written in crayon : To Stem Juvenile Robberies, Police Trail Youths Before the Crime By WENDY RUDERMAN, NYTimes - March 3rd, 2013 Three police officers knocked on the apartment door of a 15-year-old boy. He had already been on both sides of a police blotter: shot and stabbed, but also arrested on robbery charges. He ran in an East Harlem gang and lived with his grandmother on the seventh floor of a public housing building, where the stairwells reeked of marijuana. He was the type of teenager destined for trouble. And that was precisely why the officers were at his door on a recent winter night. The New York City Police Department has embarked on a novel approach to deter juvenile robbers, essentially staging interventions and force-feeding outreach in an effort to stem a tide of robberies by dissuading those most likely to commit them. Officers not only make repeated drop-ins at homes and schools, but they also drive up to the teenagers in the streets, shouting out friendly hellos, in front of their friends. The force’s Intelligence Division also deciphers each teenager’s street name and gang affiliation. Detectives compile a binder on each teenager that includes photos from Facebook and arrest photos of the teenager’s associates, not unlike the flow charts generated by law enforcement officials to track organized crime. The idea, in part, is to isolate these teenagers from the peers with whom they commit crimes — to make them radioactive. “We are coming to find you and monitor every step you take,” said Joanne Jaffe, the department’s Housing Bureau chief. “And we are going to learn about every bad friend you have. And you’re going to get alienated from those friends because we are going to be all over you.” The police also keep tabs in more covert ways. Detectives spend hours, day and night, monitoring the Facebook pages and Twitter accounts of teenagers in the program, known as the Juvenile Robbery Intervention Program, or J-RIP, and of their criminal associates. To do so, detectives create a dummy Facebook page — perhaps employing a fake profile of an attractive teenage girl — and send out “friend requests” as bait to get beyond the social network’s privacy settings. At the same time, officers seek to forge relationships with the teenager’s family, drawing them in with perquisites like a hand-delivered turkey on Thanksgiving Eve and toys and brand-name sneakers for younger siblings. Officers also provide tailored help, shuttling family members to doctors’ appointments, connecting them with alcohol and drug-abuse counseling and filling out applications for low-income housing, food stamps, child support and child care. The approach in New York comes at a time when gang violence has been blamed for higher murder and crime rates in cities like Chicago and Detroit, prompting federal and local law enforcement authorities to contemplate new initiatives to try to quell the cycle of gang activity and violence. New York’s program is no panacea to violent crime; only a few hundred teenage robbers will be in the program at any one time, all from East Harlem or the Brownsville section of Brooklyn. Nonetheless, the city’s efforts have drawn notice; the Police Department has given presentations on its program at conferences from Monterey, Calif., to Washington, D.C. “I’m not aware of any police department nationally coming up with the same strategy or replicating what the N.Y.P.D. has done here,” said David M. Kennedy, director of the Center for Crime Prevention and Control at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in Manhattan. The program builds, in part, on Mr. Kennedy’s successful homicide-reduction strategy, called Operation Ceasefire, that began in Boston in the 1990s and was later implemented in scores of cities. But New York’s program has a different and more narrow focus: Juvenile offenders who live within specific neighborhood borders yet commit robberies beyond those boundaries. Getting to Know Gangs It is the Police Department’s own brand of tough love. “We tell these teens, ‘You have a choice,’ ” Chief Jaffe said. “You will not victimize anyone else. If you commit a new robbery or any other crime that is going to hurt people, we are going to do anything we can when you get arrested to put you in jail. Your friends will get out. You are not getting out.” Youths in the program are flagged in police and court databases, so if one is rearrested, the police and prosecutors will coordinate their response. Officers who run the program said they recognized what they were up against. Of the 165 East Harlem juveniles currently in the program, 55 are members of a crew, a ganglike fraternity whose members are aligned with one housing project or another. In Brownsville, more than a dozen J-RIP youths have been shot, one fatally and another who survived his fourth shooting this past summer. Last month, a program teenager was jumped by rival gang members and stabbed three or four times. He remains paralyzed. Many teenage girls in the program have babies. “You’ll see 14-year-old mothers, 28-year-old grandmothers, 40-year-old great-grandmothers,” said Lt. David Glassberg, who runs the program in Brooklyn. “It’s crazy.” Chief Jaffe created the program in January 2007 after she noticed a spike in robberies in Brownsville, a neighborhood with 21 public housing developments within 2.2 square miles. She tried traditional policing strategies, like increased foot patrols, but the robberies persisted, she said. She decided to identify every juvenile under 18 who lived in Brownsville public housing and had been arrested for robbery, anywhere in the city. The result was a list of 106 teenagers linked to 132 robbery arrests in 2006. Only 24 percent of the robberies occurred on housing property — a distinction that was important to Chief Jaffe, because stopping these teenagers in Brownsville would have a beneficial impact throughout New York City. Part of that effort can be seen in the online work performed by Detective Patrick Kennedy and his partner, Officer Victor Ramos. They monitor the Facebook pages and Twitter accounts of dozens of J-RIP teenagers from computers inside a precinct station house in East Harlem. The sand-colored brick walls are papered with color photographs, printed from Facebook, of program teenagers posing, or “mobbing,” with peers in crews with names like “Broad Day Shooters” and “True Money Gang.” Looking at one photo, Detective Kennedy pointed out a J-RIP teenager who was flashing a crew hand signal; he was among the smallest of the group, all wearing designer Marmot and North Face jackets in lime green, purple, orange and electric blue. “When they are all colored up like this in jackets and they go walking around other developments, that’s a problem,” Detective Kennedy said. “They call that mobbing.” “To be familiar with the J-RIP kid, you have to be familiar with the crews he or she runs with as well,” Detective Kennedy continued. “We know all of the kids. And as much as we know them, they know us.” For Facebook, Detective Kennedy creates an avatar, typically the persona of a female teenager, and sends out “friend requests.” Sometimes, accepted requests are followed by a come-on from the targeted teenager, like an inquiry about where the “girl” lives or whether she wants to meet up. Department rules bar the detective from engaging, but he and Officer Ramos spend at least two hours daily monitoring the teenagers’ chatter — alert for talk of fights, party plans and criminal activities. If a program teenager is looking for trouble, Detective Kennedy said he could often see it coming and hopefully intervene. These concentrated efforts have helped produce results: Of the 106 Brownsville teenagers, only 14 were arrested for a new robbery in 2007. The success led the department to expand the program to East Harlem in 2009. Resistance to Change Leonardo Agosto, 19, entered the program that year, overseen by two police officers whose guidance continues to this day. He grew up in East Harlem, raised by a single mother who struggled with mental illness. He then described a childhood of mental abuse and poverty. He was 15 when he and his twin brother robbed two other teenagers near Central Park on 86th Street on an October 2008 night. Leonardo delivered the first blow, knocking one of the victims to the ground. “I hooked him — pow. His head went flying,” he recalled. The police later showed Leonardo a photograph of the victim’s swollen and bloodied face, the result of a fractured nose and broken jaw. The image, said Leonardo, has stuck with him. Leonardo spent seven months in a juvenile detention center. When he got out, the two officers, Gilberto Ortiz and Rafaela Rosario, began their intervention. They secretly paid for a cap and gown so Leonardo could participate in high school graduation ceremonies. They later put him on a bus to the State University of New York in Delhi. The town’s rural landscape, more than 150 miles from East Harlem, might as well have been the moon. He arrived for freshman-orientation weekend, greeted by a creek and an unsettling quiet. He recalled shutting his hotel room door; fear and pride welling up as he began to cry. He has stayed out of trouble, but challenges remain. He dropped out of college, and returned to East Harlem with nowhere to go. He now lives in a Bronx homeless shelter, sharing a room with seven older men. But he has a paid internship with a Harlem-based community organization. John Rivera, 19, who lives with his parents at the Van Dyke Houses in Brownsville, recalled how he was “chilling with the wrong crowd” at the time of his robbery arrest. His involvement in the program has made him unpopular with his former friends. “Some of them were like, ‘Oh, you working for the cops,’ ” he said. “But they just friends. Friends come and go.” Now he talks of the officers’ impact on his life. He was given a new pair of basketball sneakers — “My first LeBrons,” he announced proudly — and has been taking steps toward a G.E.D., although his police mentors were upset that he failed to show up at the J-RIP trailer near Sutter Avenue to prepare for the test. “Stop messing around,” Sergeant James Lawrence told him. “You keep telling me, ‘Yeah, yeah,’ every time I see you, and then I don’t see you,” the sergeant said. Not every effort pays off. Last winter, while driving through Brooklyn, scanning the streets for teenagers in the program, Lieutenant Glassberg said he spotted a flash of orange — deer-hunter bright. It was not the $500 orange Marmot jacket that caught his eye; it was the reedy teenager wearing it. He said he immediately suspected that the teenager, a 17-year-old gang leader named Laquan, had stolen the jacket. Lieutenant Glassberg dispatched a detective to investigate. For more than a year, the lieutenant had invested heavily in the teenager. He checked up on him at home, where he lived with a single working mother. He took him on trips to the Statue of Liberty and a Staten Island Yankees baseball game, got him a summer job and personally drove him to sessions with a therapist. Laquan entered the program in 2010 after he struck a 14-year-old boy in the head and stole his cellphone. When Laquan was indeed arrested for stealing the jacket on that January 2012 day, Lieutenant Glassberg said the teenager’s reservoir of second chances had bottomed out. “Everybody had a stake in this kid, and when he got in trouble again, I thought, ‘Well, that’s it,’ ” the lieutenant said. “He used up all his chits.” The judge agreed to hold Laquan at Rikers Island, where he remains. Breaking a Cycle When Chief Jaffe asked him to help start the program, Lieutenant Glassberg, 44, said he saw an opportunity to break the trajectory of those born into poverty and neglect, and winding up behind bars before their 18th birthday. On a recent rainy evening, the lieutenant and his team of officers piled into an unmarked police van. At about 6 p.m., they parked in front of the Howard Houses, a boxy brick high-rise building on Mother Gaston Boulevard in Brownsville, to visit a 17-year-old girl who has been in the program since last spring. Police arrested her on a gun-possession charge when she was 15. Last March, she was arrested for stealing an iPhone and beating up the victim. She gave birth to a baby born about six months ago and stopped attending school. The girl sat on a couch in the living room; her younger sister was slumped next to her, wearing an expression that conveyed petulance and boredom. Their younger brother, 10, sat at a computer, its glowing screen the only source of light. When the officers arrived, four other teenage friends scattered, disappearing down the hall to a back bedroom. “Where’s your mother?” Lieutenant Glassberg asked. The girl said she was visiting a sick aunt. The lieutenant told her about a new day care that has agreed to take the baby while she is in school. “We are going to bring you over there this week or next week; it’s brand new, beautiful,” he said. She stared at him blankly. On his way out, Lieutenant Glassberg instructed the girl’s younger siblings to clean up their bedroom and reminded the boy, who sat nervously sucking on his T-shirt, to keep the peanut butter jar in the kitchen. “You know we have problems with some critters in this place,” the lieutenant gently chided. Moments later, the boy appeared in the first-floor apartment window and waved goodbye. Overcoming Skepticism This approach to law enforcement is rarely seen by residents in some of the city’s most crime-stricken neighborhoods, where tensions between police officers and residents, particularly over stop-and-frisk policing tactics, have put up walls not easily breached. “In low-income areas, nobody really believes in the police,” a Brownsville resident, Renee Smith, said. When officers first visited her apartment after her 16-year-old nephew was arrested for robbery, Ms. Smith was suspicious and bemused. She looked at the two baby-faced officers, standing earnestly at her apartment doorway, prattling on about the program. “I’m thinking it was some sort of trick to get into your business and get you in trouble,” Ms. Smith recalled in a recent interview. Initially, doors slammed shut, often with an obscene gesture and a few choice words. The two officers, Josh Carvajal and Richard Elliott, eventually won over Ms. Smith and her nephew, Ramell, whom she adopted at age 2 because her sister had a drug problem. “They are like a father figure, like big brothers. They make Ramell laugh. They make Ramell believe in himself,” she said. Last month, Ramell earned his G.E.D. Ms. Smith, like others who have come into contact with the program, drew a distinction between these officers and the ones who patrol their neighborhoods. When Sergeant Lawrence showed up at a teenager’s apartment to drop off information about a free trip to Alaska, the teenager’s father brought up a recent stop-and-frisk police encounter. “You know they ran up on me last night,” said Anthony McCrae, 44. “I come out of the store and walked around the corner and I heard, ‘Hey you? You!’ And their lights were flashing and everything.” “Well, there’s been a problem over there with robberies,” Sergeant Lawrence offered, delicately. “I’m not out here robbing nobody. Come on,” Mr. McCrae said. Officer Carvajal changed the subject. “I forgot to tell you, starting next week, we are going to start to tutor your son. He needs some help in writing,” the officer said. Mr. McCrae, who got out of prison in 1995 after he served more than seven years for attempted murder, said he did not want his 15-year-old son to “go down that path.” “These brothers here — they real good,” Mr. McCrae said to a reporter. “They try to help out. Get my son on the right track.”

....... that you made up. zdno't know.

If I buy at the moment my risk is high based on my trade guidelines. Reward might be high but so are the risks. Period.

Maybe. To keep risk low I wait for confirmation - such as (for long entry) taking out prior high or swing high. Most times you lose out on a better entry but have better probabililities of a winner.

I don't look at everything in the markets through a wyckoff prism. On a daily basis or higher - a lower low (and/or lower high) is important by itself. But what is even more important are lower lowS (and lower highS) and if you like LL/LH pivots since the alltime highs. This I only mention in regards to the trend - not whether or not to go long or short. There are other things (time, price, pattern) I look to to determine trend and also again whether or not and where to enter a trade.

Nothing. Plain and simple. Don't like it. Sorry. Well not really sorry, but we New Yorkers call a spade a spade. NY got tough on crime and/or unlicensed gun possesion and as a result both gun crime AND gun possesion illegal or otherwise dropped. They did what gun nutz advocate. Pass tough gun crime laws and enforce them. Then as a result the nutz say less guns had nothing to do with less crime. :rofl: This culture thingy, did it involve Boy George?

Exactly what I said, to watch the levels of the first hour's (Frankfurt if Euro) trading each day. Sometimes they are coincidental with previous sup/res levels. I only look how price reacts to these levels going forward whether or not they line up with price in the past.

Talking rather than fighting unfortunately will probably always be what follows rather than leads. And humans are supposed to be a rational animal.

A lower low is just that. If we can't agree on that basic point.... time to move on.

Your words, not mine: "Gold, however, has been in a trading range since September." But by your definition any market that is not trading at an alltime high is within its previous range and therefore rangebound. And yet again another lower low today inside your trading range. Did you ever think others look at other timeframes besides .... forever.

I have a suggestion if I am not stepping on anyone's toes. I also don't know if it is wyckoff related or not. For Euro look to the first hours range (Frankfurt time, since this is the main euro trading city - which on my chart is 2am-3am ET) and watch how price reacts when it revisits the zone at some point in the future:

It depends on how one crop a chart to show their bias. You previously mentioned from high last Sept. This is what it looks like to me, Lower highs, lower lows, lower highs - well you get the picture by now. I hope so anyway:

Oct -2.94% Nov -0.28% Dec -2.32% Jan -0.73% Feb -5.09% It is clear to me, at least, once again that the range it has been trading in is not a trading range.

Careful. The more price visits a zone the more likely, at some point, that zone will no longer hold. .

Nice, put quotes and trot out around a father expressing his thoughts on losing his only child. May we never have to experience something like he has and will the rest of his life. As far as the Columbine survivor it takes all kinds.

Newtown Dad's Tearful Senate Plea for Assault Weapons Ban - ABC News "Jesse was the love of my life," said Neil Heslin, sobbing as he described his 6-year-old son before the Senate Judiciary Committee. "He was the only family I had left. It's hard for me to be here today to talk about my deceased son. I have to. I'm his voice." Everybody now, more more guns is what we need. Shoulder fired rockets too.

More like addictive. So does that make you a Pro-Lifer quoting bible verses. Along with arms, lots of arms and more arms then I guess you are in favor of the DEATH penalty. Might be misreading you but sounds like a pro-lifer to me. We get any more pro-lifers in this world we might just become extinct as a species.

Could be. I don't follow the miners that closely to have an opinion either way.

Agree and feel the same (or more so) can be said about the bankers. I read the news but trade off the chart.

Gold Miners Come Clean on Costs After Lost 6 Years: Commodities Gold Miners Come Clean on Costs After Lost 6 Years: Commodities - Bloomberg "Barrick Gold Corp. (ABX) and Goldcorp Inc. (G), the two biggest producers by market value, have begun reporting “all-in sustaining costs” for the first time. The new measure averaged $941 an ounce between the two companies in the fourth quarter. That’s 50 percent higher than the $626 average so-called cash cost they disclosed in the preceding three months."

There is also no limit to how fast you can ........ blow your account. Having winning trades is easy. Holding and building an account, which can't be rushed, is the hard part.

:rofl: ...................................

I doubt seriously that any tape reading old codger would take kindly to being called a Technical Analyst.:puke:

At best EVERY trade is a guess. Many times an educated guess with very good probablilities of success or maybe even high probabilities. Regardless it is still a guess.