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The 6499.50 target I posted in the chat room Friday morning implied that a 100-point drop was coming. It did, almost. I also said the Hidden Pivot support would need to show some pluck to hold a full-blown bear market at bay, at least for a while.  We didn't get the test we were looking for because the pattern proved too obvious and its target got front-run with ES 60 points above it; however, a test is coming nonetheless. Stay focused this week on my magic number, and don't accept anything less than a rally above C=6903.00 as minimal evidence the bull market is still breathing.

The pattern shown is not of the bluest pedigree because of its obviousness. However, it is almost certain to be useful if you plan to trade the big swings or merely want to know with confidence how oil prices are likely to behave in the weeks and months ahead. The chart is a composite, so don't expect  the levels to perform exactly. However, even so-so patterns have midpoint Hidden Pivots that 'work', so we should take last week's stall precisely at p as a sign of this particular pattern's reliability.  We don't know yet whether the futures are about to blow past p=116.89, but if they do, take it as a sign they are not merely capable of reaching a record 178.89, but that this is likely. Also, although a relapse to the green line (x=85.89) would likely produce a global sigh of relief, from our perspective it would set up a juicy 'mechanical' buy, stop 54.88, that implies yet another big price leap capable of incapacitating the global economy.  Bloomberg has quoted the usual Wall Street shills as saying crude prices would have to hit a minimum $128 and stay there for a while to bring on a recession, but these guys are such liars and morons that nothing they say can be trusted. The same could be said of 90% of the news and commentary emanating from Bloomberg, which is the most Trump-deranged of all the major news outlets. They really hate the guy, and everything they report on him has an extremely negative slant, even to the point of their hoping Iran wins the war. _______ UPDATE (Mar 23, 2:06 p.m.):  I hadn't expected crude's psychotic swings to touch the green line (85.89) so soon, but they did, triggering a 'mechanical' buy there that could have produced

GDXJ has lost a third of its value in just three weeks, exacting a brutal toll on mining-share investors that will test their faith to the utmost.  It would take a rally of at least 7.65 points from any low to trigger a buy signal on the hourly chart (a=  126.88 on 2/17). Using the 102.88 low from Friday would imply a print at 110.53 is necessary to jump-start bulls.  Thereupon, GDXJ would be presumed bound for at least p=118.19, or to 133.49 under the most bullish circumstances. This is similar to the best-case scenario I've detailed in my touts for Comex Gold and Silver, but it is hardly a good bet.

Although Trump has achieved many spectacular successes in his second term, he has made two big promises he can't possibly keep. The first was to bring back affordability to the broad middle class.  Anyone who believes this must be living on some planet with an all-powerful ruler who generously provides everyone with low-cost homes, apartments, childcare, senior care, pet care, car repairs, college tuition, groceries and insurance. Trump's second promise is that he will wind down the Iran war quickly. This ranks right up there with George W. Bush’s ‘Mission Accomplished’ speech in 2003, when major combat operations in Iraq turned out to have been far from over.  Few took him seriously at the time, just as few believe Trump is close to bringing the mullahs to their knees. Far from surrendering, they reportedly have been pondering whether to attack Israel’s Dimona reactor, a key facility in the nation’s nuclear weapons program.  The town of Dimona was hit by a powerful missile over the weekend, but if Iran targets the reactor, that could conceivably release radioactive material into the atmosphere, threatening not only to kill all human life in the region, but throughout the world. If Israeli were to retaliate proportionately, the destruction this could cause lies beyond imagining. The Annihilation Trade I usually try to focus on investable issues in these weekly commentaries, but they are less-than-trivial in comparison to a nuclear threat that could annihilate mankind.  No one doubts that Iran’s leaders are fanatics who are capable of doing anything to avoid defeat. This threat is not going to go away, nor are oil prices going to retreat any time soon. With interest rates rising, a pumped-up stock market and feverish global economy are facing a perfect storm.  If you are looking for a trade, there is probably

Wall Street evidently sees the war as little more than an annoyance, something to be gotten over as quickly as possible so that the monkeys who are paid to throw Other People's Money at stocks can get back to business as usual. Their main impediment at the moment is Trump-deranged media coverage that is rooting so hard against Trump that they are practically cheering on Iran.  Bloomberg, the New York Times and the Washington Post et al. could almost make you believe that Iran, without a Navy, can mine the Strait of Hormuz under the watchful eye of the most sophisticated minesweeper fleet on the planet. In the meantime, the news media's relentless barrage of discouragements has made it extremely difficult for the chimps and prop desk whizzes to trigger off the kind of short-squeeze leaps that could push the broad averages to new record highs in mere days. And so they continue to bide their time, waiting for cheerier headlines. Although the Dow, Nasdaq and the S&Ps have shown little life this year, neither have they shown much weakness. In any event, investors are certain to remain obsessed with oil prices until quotes recede from the $100 threshold, and until the talking heads concede that the current price dislocations are not likely to be permanent. In the meantime, this is no bear market, just a perpetual-motion money machine waiting to lurch wildly back into gear.  Oh, right, a price target: The futures look southbound most immediately for 6452.75, and a rally to the green line (x=6752.19) would trigger a 'mechanical' short, stop 6852.25. It is recommended only to subscribers who know how to cut the $5000 risk per contract to $250 or less, and it is most definitely NOT recommended to Nick.  Here's a link to my latest rant

April Gold will trigger a mechanical buy when (not if) it falls to the green line (x=4838.60). The trade is predicated on a 6084.80 target that looks like a 75% shot to be reached. I proffer this information not to get you salivating, but rather to clarify the picture at a time when price action has been lackluster and forecasts are all over the lot.  The trade rates an '8.1', which means my confidence is quite high. Since the initial risk would be $41,490 per contract, I am recommending the trade only to subscribers who are quite proficient with 'camo' entry triggers, no exceptions.

My regular commentary will resume next week when I my return from a busman's holiday on the West Coast. In its place is an excerpt from Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain that holds an epiphany for the way we experience and recall the passage of time.  It has been published here before, but this version was masterfully shortened and simplified by ChatGPT so that more readers could understand and appreciate it.  The original can be found in the chapter “Excursus on the Sense of Time” in several translations. RA There is something peculiar about deliberately settling into a new place—making the effort to adjust, to feel at home—only to leave again once that adjustment is complete. We insert such intervals into our lives as a kind of restorative break. They are meant to refresh us when the steady sameness of daily routine has begun to dull and weaken us. But this dulling is not simple physical or mental fatigue; if it were, rest alone would cure it. The real issue is psychological: when life becomes too uniform, our sense of time fades. And because our awareness of time is bound up with our awareness of being alive, when one weakens, so does the other. We commonly think that interesting experiences make time pass quickly, while monotony makes it drag. That is only partly true. Monotony does make hours feel long and tedious. Yet over longer stretches it has the opposite effect: it compresses time. Large, uniform periods shrink in memory until they seem to vanish. By contrast, rich and varied days may fly by in the moment, but they give weight and substance to life as a whole, so that years filled with variety seem fuller and longer than empty ones that slip away unnoticed.          

Yet another punk Friday suggests that the longest bull market in history is running out of gas. Considering that the war with Iran is a mop-up operation at this point, and that global jihad has suffered an extraordinary setback, the stock market should be celebrating. Instead, the S&P mini-futures couldn't even muster the last dozen or so points to reach a 6911.50 rally target I'd considered a lock-up.  The futures could have returned to the green line (x=6766.94) for a running start and another try; instead, they kept falling, canceling an ostensibly bullish pattern with a dip beneath its point 'c' low at 6718.75, just ahead of the opening bell. To complete this picture of feebleness, buyers went nowhere on Friday, even unburdened of bulls who were stopped out with the gratuitous dip beneath 6718.75. Now all DaBoyz can do is wait for "news" conducive to a short squeeze, which, as I never tire of reminding you, is where nearly all of the serious buying power comes from in bull markets. But if a decisive victory against the chief agent of evil in this world is not enough to spark such a rally, then what is? Instead, the focus of the hacks who invent the news is on the disruption of oil markets. It has been years since Wall Street much cared about events in the real world, much less a mostly imagined problem with oil shipments in the Persian Gulf (as evidenced by Israel's resumption of commercial air flights.) The Masters of the Universe should be looking past this, toward the resumption of business as usual. And yet, their dim lackeys in the news media seem crestfallen over Iran's impending defeat. (Tune to CNN for 30 minutes if you don't believe this.) Something is wrong with this picture, and

[Your editor is taking a busman's holiday in San Francisco. Although trading touts will update as usual and I'll be active in the chat room, this commentary and the next come from the archive. You can judge for yourself whether they were sufficiently on-target to still be relevant. RA] Stocks looked leaden as the week ended, adding to the impression that the aging bull market is topping. The Dow tacked on a perfunctory 104 points, or 0.22%, and it wasn't pretty. There was little life in the lunatic sector (aka 'the Magnificent Seven'), which until recently could be relied on to celebrate its wildest flights of fantasy on Fridays. The biggest winner in the bunch was META, which rose 1.80% on news that Zuckerberg is having second thoughts about his all-in bet on a metaverse. If you're unfamiliar with the term, it refers to a virtual world in which users interact online through avatars. Zuckerberg evidently thought there were hundreds of millions of us, if not billions, eager to escape the pain and drudgery of day-to-day life. He was so certain about this that he changed the name of his company in 2021 from Facebook to Meta.  But after sinking $70 billion into the concept, there has been precious little payback. Even more troubling to investors is that there are no obvious ways to make back what has been spent already, nor to recoup any further sums Meta might pour into the idea. Counting on Investors' Stupidity   To cover up this boo-boo, and to avoid being thought clueless, Zuckerberg did what any muckety-muck CEO in the digital world would have done: a twisting somersault onto the AI bandwagon.  "AI is the most important technology we are working on," he said, evidently hoping investors have forgotten that he spent the last