Judging from the emails I received today and the discussion in the chat room, April Gold’s slide from 1288 to 1230 over the last two sessions has brought bears and doubters out in force. Technically speaking, however, even if the selloff were continue all the way down to $1145, a further $80 below Monday’s settlement price, that would still represent just a ‘normal’ 0.618 retracement of the explosive rally launched from early January’s lows. Would that be healthy? It would depend on whether bulls can get traction there.  But the technical damage would be negligible on the weekly chart, if not the daily. Under the circumstances, the uptrend continues to deserve the benefit of the doubt.

Looking at a bigger picture, I’ve billboarded $1308 as an important threshold at which we might reasonably infer that the bear market begun in September 2011 is over. That number marks an important ‘external’ peak recorded on January 2015.  As such, the jury is still out, since the rally has gone no higher than 1287.80 so far. Meanwhile, my hunch is that gold will remain under pressure as long as stocks are held buoyant. If that proves to be the case, gold and silver bulls may not have long to wait, since targeted Hidden Pivot resistance lies not far above in the Dow and S&Ps.

Most immediately, night owls can try bottom-fishing at 1222.30 with a stop-loss as tight as four ticks.  If it’s hit, the next place we might look for a tradable bounce is from 1217.10, a Hidden Pivot target on the 20-min chart derived that follows from a=1250.70 (1/14 at 10:40 a.m. ET). _______ UPDATE (March 16, 3:34 p.m. ET): Gold has popped one helluva wheelie today, based on the latest, meaningless drivel from the Fed.  Although we found a way to get long during this morning’s weekly tutorial session using a tiny, bullish pattern on the one-minute chart, the larger pattern I’d referenced above did not generate a fill, since the low for the correction was yesterday’s 1226.00 — $3.70 above where I’d recommended bottom-fishing.