Gold has relapsed to the green line twice since triggering what had looked like a fine mechanical buying opportunity shortly before Christmas. It has done little since but tease, vex and antagonize, but if past is precedent, the tedium will be broken soon by a big rally to the 2184.80 target shown. That's no assurance that buying now, at levels beneath where we might have been long anyway, will produce a better trade. Since the futures remain in theory a good bet to rally back up to p=2086.40, we'll continue to look for ways to get aboard with risk tightly controlled. The entry risk for the 'textbook' 'mechanical' buy was $20k on four contracts.
Although Feb Gold had the decency to leave us with a little hope, Silver is not being so kind. Its clean destruction of the midpoint pivot (p=22.868) leaves little room for doubt about whether the weakness of the last month will continue on down to the 22.01 target shown. In the meantime, we should plan to get short on a blip to the green line (x=23.295), since the 'mechanical' aspects of the trade look promising. The pattern may also be gnarly enough to use D=22.015 for bottom-fishing.
TLT feathered down to the 93.23 midpoint support of the pattern shown, but the low created by the small bounce so far from this Hidden Pivot will need to be tested before we can infer the bull trend begun in October remains healthy. The corrective move could come all the way down to D=85.89 without damaging the recovery. However, the presumptive power of the next rally leg will be greater if the correction from December's 100.57 peak goes no lower than p=93.23. This is the case so far, since last week's low occurred at 93.26.
This mudder was a hair shy of triggering a conventional 'buy' signal at the green line when last week ended. My gut feeling is that the signal will ultimately produce a profit with a move at least to the red line. Why should Mr Market be so kind to us? Don't count on it. More likely is that although the futures will indeed reach the red line, this will occur on a gap through x=33.94 that leaves our bid choking on dust. Even so, we can always try to get aboard by outsmarting the s.o.b. _______ UPDATE (Jan 22, 11:12 p.m.): A gratuitous new low has brought the green line down to 33.92 and the red one to 34.53.
When forecasting stock prices, it helps to view the market as a crazed creature driven by fear, greed, and most of all, stupidity. Of course, everyone but the "theme"-obsessed chimpanzees who purport to manage your money understands that the stock market's heedless ascent into horrifying news is rock-bottom stupid. In this case, the very bad news coming is already known: Treasury borrowing over the next twelve months will dwarf anything that has ever been attempted before. "The volume to be financed in U.S. Government debt is staggering, historically unprecedented, and absolutely impossible," writes my colleague Jim Willie. Nearly $1.6 trillion will be needed to finance outlays for fiscal year 2024, and an additional $7 trillion of maturing debt must be rolled, much of it into paper of shorter duration. "That comes to around $800 billion per month, when $100 billion has been difficult on a monthly basis," Willie notes. It will occur at a time when sovereign buyers of U.S. debt, particularly China, have been dumping T-bonds. The extremely heavy auction calendar portends a sharp rise in interest rates that threatens to crush corporate earnings, create a tsunami of bankruptcies and trip the U.S. economy into deepest recession. The shock of it would be made worse by the brazen statistical lies The Guvmint has fed us concerning GDP growth, hiring and the supposed health of the economy. All have been egregiously overstated in an election year, gobs of bright lipstick on a pig. Triggering 'Stupid' This grim picture, in contrarian fashion, appears to have triggered the 'stupid' factor into overdrive, sending stocks soaring on Friday as though the U.S. and global financial picture were just peachy. How long can this gusher of mass hysteria last? Once again, I turn to a chart of Microsoft shares for the answer. It still
We'll need to be on our guard as the S&Ps frolic in the discomfort zone, just an inch above the then-record highs recorded at the start of 2022. The Mother of All Tops is very likely to come with a series of upward spasms, each of which creates a marginal new high. However, looking casually at this chart, the eye 'wants' to see one of those highs occur on a nasty and distinctive spike that presumably would disembowel the last remaining shorts. This may require a running start from below 4500, and if the futures were to fall to there now, I would still expect one last run-up. Meanwhile, Microsoft seems no less likely to reach the 430 target I've been drum-rolling as a bellwether, even if the process is as fraught as the one I've described above for the S&Ps.
A moment of truth, if not THE moment, likely impends as AAPL rises toward the green line. Assuming it gets there this week or perhaps early next, the stock would become as juicy a 'mechanical' short as we could hope for. If, instead, it gores bears with a move above the pattern's 'c' high at 199.62, that would surely be bullish, notwithstanding the head-fake possibility I've warned about in the ES tout (see above). A third possibility is that AAPL will fall to d=175.31 of the reverse pattern. That would create a bottom-fishing opportunity that we should not pass up, even if the expected bounce proves to be a short-lived last gasp for this aging bull.
Feb Gold's bounce from the green line took time to develop and is still not airborne. But the uptrend should at least reach the red line, validating the strong 'mechanical' buy signal that triggered on the pullback. We are used to disappointment in this vehicle, and impatient about when the long-term bull market will once again shift into high gear. When it does, the next target of consequences above the one at 2184.80 show in the chart lies at 2273.60, a Hidden Pivot resistance derived from a continuous monthly chart where A=681 in 2008.
Silver took a dump after triggering what had looked like a promising 'mechanical' buy at 23.80, the green line. Its February Gold counterpart has held up better and appears primed for a rally to a profit-taking level at 2086, about 35 dollars above Friday's close. Is Silver's recalcitrance a bearish divergence? I doubt it. It is probably just a variation on an all-too- familiar theme of jerking everyone's chain whenever possible. Let's cross our fingers and hope silver plays catch-up with gold in the week ahead.
T-Bonds have fallen moderately so far following a 100.57 top in this ETF vehicle that we'd anticipated precisely with the purchase of put options. The new pattern shown can be used to set up more trades now that TLT has tripped a reverse-pattern sell signal at the green line. There are two possible opportunities in prospect: 1) shorting near x=96.91 with a 'camouflage' trigger to reduce risk; and, 2) playing for a bounce from p=93.26. If you are interested in the more immediate opportunity, please let me know so that I can provide timely guidance in the chat room.
