In the sci-fi classic The Day the Earth Stood Still, the extraterrestrial scientist Klaatu demonstrated the technological prowess of his civilization to the bellicose citizens of Earth by making every powered device on the planet stop working for an hour. On Friday, one could have imagined that Klaatu was back, this time training his dark magic on the New York Stock Exchange. With the ticker tape crawling at the pace of a centipede after knee surgery, even Hidden Pivots seemed to be working in slow motion. Friday's obligatory headless-chicken act popped the Dow slightly above one such pivot shortly after the opening, implying that an additional hundred points of upside was possible. Four hours later, though, the Indoos were still oscillating aimlessly within an unnaturally tight 30-point range. Gold futures turned just as moribund after spiking briefly in the early going. The bulls got winded quickly, sending the April Comex contract into a sharp dive. But the kamikaze threat stalled a few dollars shy of a 652.50 threshold that would have created a bearish impulse leg on the hourly chart. Our short-term forecast for gold had been bullish, but there was nothing in Friday's price action to reaffirm the positive signs we'd seen in the run-up since mid-March. However, technically speaking, gold's weakness did only minor damage to a picture that I would still rate as mildly promising. Seldom Mistaken That said, I heard from two particularly astute gold bugs yesterday whose hunches have seldom proven wrong -- and both are bearish on bullion at the moment (albeit for different reasons). 'I have so many reasons for being suspicious of gold at this point, and I am inclined to wait until I see the whites of its eyes,' wrote Phil D, using a battlefield metaphor that many of us do not need to
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