Rick Ackerman

Three successive, marginally higher tops in the last three months have made this vehicle more than a little tiresome. The futures will need to come down to at least p=2352.00 of this latest, bullish pattern before we can get a confident read on how long the tedium might last before gold blasts off toward 3000. We might be able to determine trend strength accurately as early as Monday or Tuesday by looking at patterns going in either direction on the lesser charts, so stay tuned.

A full correction to the 27.41 'd' target shown would be a back-up-the- truck buying opportunity that could be initiated with a tight stop-loss. We should be alert to the possibility, however, that the retracement will fall somewhat shy of d before reversing.  A logical 'fooler' spot for a reversal would be from near 28.11, the midway point between p2 and d.  A second possibility would be a turn from around 27.72, midway between the last two prior lows. In any case, I expect sellers to bring the futures down below the 28.90 low from June 28 before a turnaround can occur.

Friday's decisive breach of the 45.95 midpoint support of the reverse pattern shown implies the correction is likely to hit d=42.78 before it ends. GDXJ did run back up to p at the close, but the fact that it still settled below this Hidden Pivot can only be read as a negative. A retracement rally to x=47.53 would generate a textbook mechanical short, so don't pass up the opportunity if it materializes. The 'd' target can be bottom-fished if and when GDXJ gets there, but the obviousness of the pattern, even though it's a reverse, will work against a precise turn.

Bears shouldn't get their hopes too high just because the S&P 500 plummeted for three straight days last week. The selloff seemed tightly scripted, given that the Dow Industrials were rising just as sharply at least part of that time. This is shown in the chart above, which captures price action on Thursday. The implication is that portfolio managers were simply shifting money from one simmering vat to another, an efficient way to keep stocks bubbling without expending much capital. Someday their ingenious siphon pump will be overwhelmed by honest-to-goodness selling. You'll know the weakness is real because it will last for three or more days, it will encompass all of the broad indexes, and it will gain in momentum. Three straight days of selling has been an extremely rare occurrence since this gaseous bull run began in March 2020, just before the covid hoax laid seige to the U.S. economy. But four days? You'd have to go back many years to find an instance of this. Lessons to Unlearn Even the 1987 crash didn't last for three full days. It began on the afternoon of Friday, October 16, but by mid-morning on Tuesday, October 19, selling had dried up and stocks were poised to come roaring back. Bears who were slow to cover short positions got savaged almost as badly as bulls who'd been trapped in the initial avalanche. The downtrend had drawn enormous power from huge open positions in far-out-of-the-money put options. For years, selling them 'naked' was considered a reliable source of free money. But when stocks started to fall hard on that fateful Friday, the ordinarily docile puts turned into a water-cannon enema for short sellers. Traders learned their lesson, and more than a few of my colleagues in the pits of the Pacific Stock Exchange

Stories about San Francisco's death appear to have been exaggerated. I arrived there Saturday for a five-week stay, a getaway from Florida's insufferable summer heat. It didn't take me long to recall why, at age 28, I came to San Francisco and stayed until I was 50. For one, the weather rarely turns hot, even when the rest of the country is sweltering.  And on those rare occasions when a heat wave descends on the city, there is always an ocean of fog lurking just outside the Golden Gate, ready to pour onto the streets whenever high temperatures linger for more than a few days. It was an invigorating 65 degrees when I stepped off a JetBlue plane at SFO on Saturday morning. I'd departed Ft. Lauderdale shortly after sunrise with the thermostat already climbing into the mid-80s and humidity approaching steam-bath levels. Arriving in San Francisco was like encountering the crystal blue ice of a Norwegian fjord. I was greeted by an old friend who has been a player for decades on the periphery of the commercial real estate market. He contends that most of the negative press the city gets is just flackery employed by developers to drive down prices. Not only have they succeeded at this, they have begun to seed long-neglected warehouse districts with large sums of money, turning them into magnets for tech entrepreneurs, residential developers, skilled tradesmen and mostly-Asian workers who earn $300,000 or more per year with their extraordinary STEM skills. So many luxury apartments have sprung up to house these young whizzes that I didn't realize at first that I was in my old Portrero Hill neighbohood, which sits literally on the other side of the railroad tracks, about a mile south of downtown San Francisco. Eldorado's Infrastructure The drive took us

This chart, with a 5823.00 target, looks more reliable than the one displayed here last week. It projected a 5879 top, but let's see how buyers fare at the lower target before we try to get a read on trend strength. A pullback to the green line (x=5582.75) would generate a 'mechanical' buying opportunity that you should not pass up if you trade this vehicle. Be sure to check in at the chat room before you jump on it, though, since the implied risk of doing this one by-the-book would be around $16k on four contracts.

I've used the 'extension' of a larger pattern's C-D- leg to produce a chart that will be more usable for trading purposes. It is similar to the one accompanying the E-Mini S&P tout above, and it also offers similarly enticing odds for a 'mechanical' bid placed at the green line (x=418.37). The theoretical stop-loss would be at 388.02, implying the trade should be initiated using a 'camouflage' set-up on a small-degree, intraday chart. There can be no certitude that the stock will reach D=509.40, since the move through p=448.72 was not dramatic. You can count on a ride to at least 479.06, however, no matter where  you get long.

TLT is taking its sweet old time getting airborne, and even surmounting the small distance remaining to p=96.42 cannot be assumed. The last upward stab failed to take out any external peaks, and that is an additional factor to consider. My gut feeling is that the October 2023 low at 82.42 was a major one and that it will endure for the foreseeable future. Regardless, we'll need to see a strong push past p=96.42 the first time buyers encounter it in order to infer that the D target at 105.49 is likely to be achieved.

Although GDXJ broke out last week, the chart shown in the inset, for August Comex futures, leaves me skeptical. I would remain at least somewhat so even if the rally were to surpass the 2477.0 peak recorded on May 24.  However, I wouldn't hesitate to buy a pullback to the red line (p=2340.60) mechanically. The by-the-book stop-loss would be at 2295.10, so we'd need to craft a less risky set-up to leverage the opportunity. For the moment, though, this vehicle remains on a 'mechanical'-short signal.