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My coverage of crude will remain perfunctory, since paying closer attention might induce coma. Its gratuitous ups and downs over the last three years have been worse than merely screwing the pooch. The head-fakes, foot-fakes and other annoyances are especially difficult to trade, and even voodoo numbers don't seem to work. Although the sonofabitch cannot outsmart us when we observe its stupid little tricks on a 5-minute chart, it's simply not worth the effort to stalk them. No one has mentioned crude in the chat room in months -- not even Artie -- but I will continue to answer your trading-related questions as always.

The party is over, or so says the chart above. It is a long-term picture of the E-Mini S&Ps, and it shows the futures rolling down after touching a 6136 target that has been nearly five years in coming. Actually, it has taken nearly 16 years to get there since the longest bull market in U.S. history began in March 2009. The economy was emerging from the devastation of the Great Financial Crash, ready to embark on a fresh cycle of foolishness that has put Americans much deeper in hock. The major stock indices have more than quadrupled since then, and anyone who has stayed fully invested in index futures or a few high-flying 'lunatic stocks' would have achieved long-term gains that no portfolio manager in decades past could have imagined. My analysis has utilized a standard ABCD pattern to project the 6135.25 top.  However, it should not be expected to work precisely for two reasons. For one, it is a blended chart, with key highs and lows derived from many successive contract months. Although the coordinates are matched closely, the result is not seamless, and the 'D' target could therefore be off by as much as 10 to 15 points. For two, the pattern is so in-your-face obvious that every Tom, Dick and Harry who fancies himself a chartist would have spotted it more than a year ago and used it to ride the bull to the top. Obvious, but Potent Assuming they did, more than a few would have reversed their positions and gotten short at the recent peak. If so, we shouldn't be surprised to see a short squeeze rip them a new orifice in the weeks ahead. The result would be a jagged top littered with the bodies of intrepid traders. Whatever happens, I strongly doubt

The S&Ps have yet to collapse in the heat of Santa Season as I had suggested they might, but they are acting mighty strange.  Friday should have been a slam-dunk for bullish seasonality. Instead, the futures doubled-topped just shy of a juicy rABC rally target before selling off hard to end the week. Granted, there was a heavy layer of supply just beneath early December's record high near 6200. But it's not as though setting up a short-squeeze to get past it should have posed any difficulty for the scumballs who manipulate the markets. Let's give it another day to see whether the thimble-riggers are impaired or merely toying with shorts. If the latter, the futures should produce a profitable 'mechanical' buy at the green line (x=5930.44). You can trade this one for real if you know what you are doing, but it is not recommended for Hidden Pivot greenhorns.

I’m making no bold predictions for 2025, since getting it right in these way-too-interesting times is like trying to guess when a ticking time bomb will explode. When it does, the shrapnel will pop an economic bubble so pumped with folly, greed and hubris that only a Wall Street shill or a madman could believe the soft-landing story. Made-up statistics to support this fantasy are being peddled aggressively nonetheless by the likes of Bloomberg, The Wall Street Journal and a few other mainstream sources whose editors evidently are incapable of imagining what a hard landing might look like. For starters, a commercial real estate market that has been imploding in slow motion for more than three years will collapse with the swiftness of a black hole, swallowing up a galaxy of underperforming assets in nanoseconds. Tens of trillions of dollars’ worth of imagined ‘wealth’ will be wiped from the global ledger by the tsunami that follows.  And yet, against this likelihood, Wall Street’s newspaper of record can still report with a straight face that some Manhattan landlords are starting to make money with office rentals. A recent article would have us believe the city's property market may have bottomed. The unfortunate truth is that the relative handful of big companies that are signing leases rather than fleeing New York's high taxes and rampant street crime have been moving into showcase buildings that represent only a minuscule fraction of rentable space. Meth-Money Bitcoin’s inevitable implosion could set an even bigger disaster in motion. The collapse will inflict long-lasting psychological damage on securities markets, but it will also purge an important source of meth-money from the financial shell game that sustains global GDP. The possibility that Bitcoin will fall from whatever peak it achieves above $100,000 to under $100 exists because it

I've lowered my target for Treasurys so often that it's time to face the music. The 73.69 'D' Hidden Pivot shown in the chart is where this ETF proxy for the long bond is probably going, and it is not a pretty picture. The punditry, editorialists and Bloomberg bozos can blather all they want about the economy's supposedly soft landing, but this is wishful thinking. Interest rates are headed even higher, and this will crush markets that owe their artificial robustness to easy financing; cars and houses, to name just two. It will also turn the irreparable devastation in commercial real estate into a catalyst for the Second Great Depression. The chart pattern is too clear to deny, especially since it has already worked several times to produce profitable 'short' trades on the way down. A second test of p2=85.44 could conceivably turn this cinder block higher, but we shouldn't look for miracles. ______ UPDATE (January 5): TLT continued to hover near death's door, extending its distributive, sideways scuddle for another week. It would need to pop above 88.91, an external peak shown in this chart, to emerge from purgatory. _______ UPDATE (Jan 10): TLT stopped scuddling, the better to plunge anew. It ended the week with an imminent test in prospect of the 82.42 low recorded in October 2023. A two-day close beneath it would all but ordain more progress down to 73.69, a target that would have seemed unimaginable when this symbol spiked to a covid-era peak at 179.70 in March 2020.

The chart shows interest rates on the Ten-Year Note rising over the next 8-12 months to 5.5% from a current 4.5%.  This will devastate the economy and lay bare the delusion that America's economy is booming. The 5.5% figure is deceptive, because, presumably, it will be achieved with asset values falling. If we repeat the experience of the Great Financial Crash of 2007-08, that would imply real rates (i.e., adjusted for deflation) rising to as high as 6%-10%. That would usher in an economic depression at a time when the U.S. economy is in much worse shape to weather adversity than in 1929. Back then, a third of the workforce was tied to the agricultural economy, literally living off the land. This time, perhaps 80% of the workforce is tied to bullshit. That figure is not invented, by the way; it is simply extrapolated from Musk's firing 80% of Twitter's employees without impairing the company's ability to carry on normally.

It has been years since the E-Mini S&Ps created a bearish impulse leg of daily-chart degree. They did so last week, however, with a plunge that breached the required two lows: a small 'internal' from December 10, and the external low at 5921.00 recorded on November 19. The implication is that the urgent short-squeeze rally on Friday will sputter out shortly, allowing the futures to resume their well-deserved slide into hell. It will be interesting to see whether this happens before New Year's, which would be the kind of shocker that takes everyone, bull and short-covering bear alike, down with it.  This seems difficult to imagine, given that the rigged support system for the stock market is ubiquitous. It includes Fed funny-money, portfolio managers locked into a handful of high-fliers, and share buybacks by companies with many more tens of billions than they know what to do with. Be patient, permabears. Your day is coming, probably sooner rather than later.

GDXJ is probably within no more than five points of groping its way to the bottom of the textbook head-and-shoulders pattern shown in the hourly chart (see inset). If it's going to revive sooner rather than later, though, the secondary pivot at 43.44 would be a logical place for this to occur. You can bottom-fish there with a tight stop-loss, using expiring call options if you've got the chops. I've used a dubious one-off 'A' high here, and the pattern could turn out to be governed by the marquee high at 55.58, so plan accordingly.

The Dollar Index pulled back hard on Friday, half-correcting the steep upthrust from two days earlier. Given how the uptrend impaled the midpoint Hidden Pivot (p=107.36), there is little room for doubt about whether D=109.30 will be reached. As noted earlier, that would keep weight on gold. It would also set up a potential 'mechanical' buying opportunity at p=107.36.  We don't often do this trade at p, but the trend is so strong that waiting for a relapse to the green line (x=106.39) might leave us empty-handed when the turn comes. _______ UPDATE (Dec 28): The dollar has hovered stubbornly aloft, denying us an opportunity to bottom-fish at the red line (p=107.36). The trade recommendation remains viable nonetheless.