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I've raised the bar somewhat so that we don't get suckered by yet another failed rally. I'm already on record as saying the bear market ended, possibly with October's 82.42 low.  But I'd feel more confident about this if TLT takes an uncorrected leap above the two peaks shown. If it relapses instead, I would still expect no worse than a marginal penetration of the October low, followed by a sustained rally whose steepening pitch will leave little doubt that an important trend change has occurred.

How are you coping with gold's endless dither? It just entered its fourth month, and there is not much to celebrate. Of course, everyone "knows" it will be moving higher. Just not now. Last week's tout warned subscribers not to get too excited if the futures should take flight, since no rally since April has shown any follow-through. And so it went yet again, with a fleeting surge to nowhere that was reversed just as quickly. Looking ahead, there is a magnetic Hidden Pivot target at 3695 that gold's handlers will not be able to put off indefinitely. Keep it in mind as we endure the anomie of markets that have been rigged by Hamptons capos for silent running.

Although the biggest players in the tech world have sunk trillions of dollars into AI research and development, none of them has made a dime. Will they ever? That’s a reasonable question, considering no one really knows how AI will reshape the economic world, other than eliminating many millions of jobs. The investment frenzy continues to gain momentum nonetheless, recalling the South Sea Bubble of the ‘roaring’ 1720s. A widely quoted item from that era was a prospectus for a company claiming to be carrying on "an undertaking of Great Advantage but no one to know what it is." One could argue that it’s different this time, but is it really? Quite possibly not, considering that Bitcoin, a currency with no intrinsic value, has increased in value from an initial $0.003 in 2010 to a current $118,000. These are crazy times, and nothing drives people crazier than the prospect of thousandfold returns on their savings. However, before you plunk down your own hard-earned dollars on a flight of fantasy, check out my recent interview on Howe Street. (Note: I make an exception for Nvidia shares, for reasons that are explained in the interview.)

The stock market continues to waft higher with the riskless predictability of loaded dice. DaBoyz have trained their firepower on just a few high-flyers, chiefly Microsoft and Nvidia, in order to squeeze the broad averages skyward with an absolute minimum of capital. I've explained here before in exhaustive detail how this carnival midway trick is performed, beginning with a short-covering gap on most mornings that precipitously reverses overnight selling after it has dried up. Putting aside the fakery and tedium of the seemingly endless bull market, along with the Epstein saga and Trump's tiresome tariff antics, the most interesting story in the news last week was Tulsi Gabbard's tweets implicating Barack Obama in treason. Although Biden, frequently photographed slurping an ice cream cone, would seem to have a lock on Worst President Ever, it is Obama who will go down in history as the leader who did America the most harm, all of it deliberate. A Years-Long Coup Treason is not too strong a word here, although we shouldn't get our hopes too high that his punishment, assuming he is charged and convicted, will fit the crime. When he summoned Comey, Clapper and Brennan to the Oval Office on December 9, 2016, they had already stated publicly there was no evidence Russia had interfered in the 2016 election. Despite this, said Gabbard, Obama directed them to fabricate a new narrative asserting that the Russians had in fact worked behind-the-scenes to help Trump beat Hillary. The three men and their staffs proceeded to reverse their findings, said Gabbard. Then, two weeks before Trump took office, they "unveiled the new, Obama-directed politicized assessment, a gross weaponization of intelligence that laid the groundwork for a years-long coup intended to subvert President Trump's entire presidency." Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, said she has

Microsoft's deftly engineered short squeeze minutes before the opening bell on Friday slightly exceeded the 516.95 target we'd been using to stay confidently on the right side of a heavily overextended trend. The top was fleeting, volumeless and not just a little sleazy, creating a possible top that could endure for a while. Let's use the green line (x=483.95) as a minimum downside target for now. If it is touched, that would imply more downside to at least p=453.26 (the red line, a midpoint Hidden Pivot support).

A crucial Hidden Pivot support at 83.53 doesn't look long for this world. Last week's dive came within 66 cents of it, but the bounce so far has been too feeble to suggest the uptrend will continue. But bulls would need to exceed July 10's 'external' peak at 87.05 to give this vehicle a fighting chance. I remain convinced, however, that T-Bonds are not far from a bottom despite the fact that Trump has been doing his utmost to turn them into shit. Perhaps it will take a full-blown recession to turn the tide for Treasurys? There doesn't appear to be one in the offing, but that could change quickly if stocks turn down hard for no apparent reason, as they always do at the onset of a bear market. Trump's daily flip-flops on Powell, however, are bullish for stocks, since he doesn't even have to fire the guy to strengthen the perception that tightening will be impossible on his watch.

I went out on a limb recently with a prediction that T-Bonds had made an important low.  Last week's price action in this ETF was hardly reassuring, however. Not only did it breach a midpoint Hidden Pivot support I'd noted at 85.99, it also generated a bearish impulse leg on the daily chart. Let's give it the slight benefit of the doubt for now, since there are two remaining HP supports to be breached before we throw in the towel. They lie, respectively, at 84.76 (p2) and 83.53 (d).

The pattern shown is ugly-gnarly, but there is no mistaking the power of the rally that pushed it past p=34.75 in early June. This all but clinched more upside to D=41.06 in the weeks ahead. Our best opportunity to get long would be via a bid at 'd' of a reverse pattern. There have been no sufficient pullbacks on the weekly chart to enable this, but the intraday charts will nearly always provide the signal we're  looking for.  Query me in the chat room when appropriate and I may be able to provide timely guidance.

Nvidia became the world's first $4 trillion company last week, leapfrogging Microsoft, Tesla, Google and every other company struggling to stay in the AI game.  Our money is on Musk to compete the hardest. He is Nvidia's biggest customer for their most powerful chips, which sell for as much as $200,000. Musk has been buying them by the tens of thousands. He recently converted a vacuum cleaner factory in Tennessee into a site for the world's largest supercomputer. It draws so much power that the cooling plant alone cost will cost $80 million. The machine will be used to train Grok, Musk's horse in an AI field crowded with corporate strivers. Grok reportedly overtook competitors recently with a demonstration that showed the app capable of thinking almost like a human. Even skeptics were impressed with the way Grok figured out a novel way for hospitals to save power.  What startled them, however, was that Grok hadn't even been asked about this; the AI assistant simply inferred and suggested it based on another, seemingly unrelated, energy solution it had worked on that even MIT-trained engineers hadn't thought of. But even if Nvidia has yet a few more prospective customers in Musk's league, is the company worth $4 trillion?  A physicist friend of mine who uses AI intensively in his business said the stock is only warming up and that NVDA's current price is a certain bet to double yet again. But exactly what will their chip customers sell to the world that could possibly justify such astronomical valuations? It would have to be much more than mere gains in productivity -- or even that old investible standby, a cure for cancer. Monsters from the Id In an earlier commentary, I suggested facetiously that Nvidia and companies immediately downstream of it were