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The 48,834 rally target we've been using is still tracking nicely, although it would take a decisive pop above p=38,822 to make the target an odds-on bet to be achieved. So far, buyers have merely head-butted the red line without penetrating it. Last week's 18736 high came close enough, though, that any pullback to the green line (x=33,816) should be regarded as an opportunity to get long 'mechanically'. The appropriate stop-loss would be at 28,809, a tick below the pattern's point 'C' low.  I would like to track a second, cheaper crypto vehicle here, so please let me know in the chat room what your favorites are.  GBTC, the vehicle I've been using, has the drawback of trading only during daytime hours. _______ UPDATE (Feb 9, 1:23 p.m. EST): In GBTC, The gap through p=43.03 to start the week has all but guaranteed that D=57.70 will be reached. Given the high quality of the pattern, I would also expect a tradeable pullback precisely from that Hidden Pivot resistance. The equivalent target in $BRTI is 53,169. ______ UPDATE (Feb 10, 9:42 a.m.): No change. BRTI's most recent leap came within 1% of the 48834 target, so it should be considered fulfilled. _______ UPDATE (Feb 11, 7:12 p.m.): Today's bullish spasm hit 48,672, just 0.2% from my target, but it will take a two-day close above it to put 53,169 solidly in play.

Gold turned last week from within an inch of a secondary pivot at 1782.10 that I'd drum-rolled in the chat room. It was an afterthought, although I sometimes like to half-joke that all vehicles in all time frames, whether trending up or down, tend to reverse at p2. The rebound picked up steam on Friday, but we should wait at least until it exceeds the green line (1846.60) before breaking out a bottle of Ripple to celebrate.  This would generate a moderately appealing 'mechanical' short, although I'll suggest letting it pass, since gold is not actually weak, just rigged to appear that way. That implies the 1749.80 downside target (see inset) will not be reached, but we'll let the chart speak for itself rather than guess about the future. ______ UPDATE (Feb 9, 7:50 p.m.): The asphyxiating southbound slog since August's $2107 high will likely have been nearly as unsatisfying for bears as for bulls, since it has amounted to a mere 10% pullback, punctuated by feisty rallies to nowhere, over the six-month period. The futures tripped a mechanical short today with a rally to the green line (1846.60), but it doesn't feel like a winner. I guess that makes me slightly bullish for the near term, since it implies a pop above C=1878.90. _______ UPDATE (Feb 11, 7:16 p.m.): The 'mechanical' short is up $1900 per contract at the moment, but 1814.40 is where it should be covered,for a gain of $3200. Use an 1840.00 stop-loss for now.

I've quickened the drumbeat over the last few weeks to warn that a bear market that will have been nearly 12 years in coming may finally have arrived.  You should be holding put options, including some butterfly spreads, in any of numerous trading vehicles that recently topped very precisely at targets predicted here as long as two months ago. Two nearly perfect hits occurred, respectively, in IWM and the E-Mini Nasdaq.  Concurrently, the E-mini S&Ps, the Dow Industrials and bellwether AAPL, have turned down sharply from midway between p2 and D. I did not view this seeming anomaly as putting them out of sync with the lunatic-powered indexes favored by portfolio managers (aka "the chimps"), since it is not unusual for long-term trends, even bull markets, to fall shy of 'D' targets. The Hidden Pivot Method cannot tell us with certainty when a bear market has begun; however, it has been quite impressive at nailing tops of lesser degree and at producing robust profits trading occasionally against the granddaddy of all bull markets. And now? A key rule of Hidden Pivot analysis is that if the dominant trend has shifted from bullish to bearish, stocks, ETFs, indexes and futures should begin to exceed their 'D' targets to the downside. Correspondingly, and with equal consistency in charts of all time frames, corrective abcd-type rallies should start to sputter out shy of their 'd' targets -- typically at p, the midpoint Hidden Pivot support. What to Look For These factors should be foremost in our minds as the E-Mini S&Ps (see chart inset) approach their first D target on the hourly chart since the selloff began last Tuesday. My expectation is that D=3664.75 will give way easily, but that even if not, the futures will close beneath it. If a bear market

My outlook and trading advice for silver is more bullish than for gold at the moment due to the latter's punk performance on the hourly chart. I tend to treat each separately in such instances rather than have feelings about one vehicle corrupt the accuracy of my forecast for the other.  In this case, Silver looks primed to drag Gold higher. How's that, you ask??  Well, the Reddit brats reportedly are intent on short-squeezing silver because they don't like the way DaScumballs who rule precious-metals markets often manipulate bullion quotes lower to cover short positions at bargain prices. We sincerely wish the brats all possible success in this worthy venture, but they ought to read Bunky Hunt's epitaph before they get carried away with themselves. Concerning Feb Gold, there is mild evidence to support  the case for a fall to p=1811.60 of the pattern shown (using the circled peak as 'C'), or even to D=1745.80. The equivalent numbers for the April contract are p=1814.40, and D=1749.80.  Looking at the charts in toto, though, it's clear that bears are not having any more success than bulls at profiting from bullion's ups and downs. Under the circumstances, I am making no recommendation, nor even ballyhooing a target. It could go either way, and I'm having difficulty caring which right now. _______ UPDATE (Feb 4, 9:16 p.m. EST): Here's the April chart, with a secondary (p2) HP support at 1782.10 that I didn't mention earlier. I proffer it now to those clinging to the hope that this unwarranted and gratuitous shakeout won't be quite as bad as it could get. ______ UPDATE (Feb 4, 9:25 p.m.): The little weasel plunged to 1784.60, an inch shy of the 1782.10 target flagged above, before rebounding moderately into the close.  The rally will become more credible

Silver continues to outperform gold in subtle technical ways that are encouraging. On Friday, for instance, the March contract blew past a midpoint Hidden Pivot associated with a D target at 30.10. This implies the target is probably no worse than a 60% shot to be achieved. It also makes a pullback to the green line (x=25.55) an enticing spot for a 'mechanical' bid with a stop-loss at 24.03. (It may be possible to pare the entry risk by as much 90% using an rABC set-up, so stay tuned.) We might not be gifted with a nasty correction to x; regardless, price action in the chart supports a more bullish bias than we've allowed since late December. ______ UPDATE (Feb 1, 11:45 a.m. EST): Wowee! The strongest leap in 11 years has pushed the futures past my target, somewhat exceeding a revised target at 30.18 that I posted in the chat room. The ferocity with which the rally has impaled p=28.30 of a larger pattern is quite bullish and has raised the odds of more upside to at least D=34.675 to around 75%. Here's the chart. _______ UPDATE (Feb 1, 9:31 p.m.): The pullback has further to go, presumably to at least 27.77, where it would fill a gap created by the powerful leap begun three days ago from 24.71. ____UPDATE (Feb 2, 6:08): The correction from the top of Monday's exuberant spike to 30.35 has been brutal, erasing nearly two thirds of the substantial gains achieved since last Wednesday.  Even so, because the spike impaled the 28.30 midpoint pivot, odds are still good that the 34.675 target will eventually be achieved with or without the support of the Reddit  crowd. _______ UPDATE (Feb 4, 9:46 p.m.):  The futures would  become a fetching 'mechanical' buy at x=25.11. I'd have to

The news media went all-in over the weekend trying to explain the significance of the Gamestop saga, but because few traders were asked about it, there was little in this torrent of analysis to enlighten. Most of the reporters, talking heads and pundits focused on the obvious, sensationalizing a story about how the little guys have drawn first blood and are about to stick it to giant hedge funds by targeting their short positions. This kind of claptrap makes for salacious reading, but there's a much bigger story that has so far gone untouched. Before I explain, here's some point-and-counterpoint to get you past the disingenuous swill being dished out in the blogosphere and by the mainstream media: Popular Narrative:  The Reddit/Robinhood mob (RRM) has declared war on hedge fund biggies, and so far the smart money has been getting its butt kicked. Reality: The damage so far is just a mosquito bite on the behind of hedge fund elephants like Steven A. Cohen, and the Reddit mob a five-year-old who has discovered where Daddy keep the matches. PopularNarrative: “We’re going after Citadel next!” Reality:  Nice try, kids, but this kind of hubris is going to boomerang  on you. As a rallying cry, it makes good headline fodder, since the name ‘Citadel’ conjures up the financial establishment’s most impregnable fortress. In the end, though, you can bet on Citadel & Friends to change the game so that the edge you pishers currently enjoy evaporates quickly, assuming it hasn’t already. Popular Narrative: "After Citadel, we're going to squeeze shorts in silver." Reality: We're actually rooting for you on this one, since precious-metals markets are manipulated by unmitigated scumbags. And, yes, your merely having announced last week that silver is in your cross hairs seems to have provided a little added boost

A little more than two decades ago, amidst the wild excesses of the dot-com boom, I wrote what turned out to be an epitaph for those heady times in the The San Francisco Examiner. It bore the headline Monsters from the Id Threaten the System, a metaphorical nightmare that I’ll explain shortly. Then as now, vast quantities of money driving stocks to absurd heights seemed practically limitless. ‘Easy Al’ Greenspan was in charge of the Fed, and the loose monetary policies he pursued reflected some of the crackpot ideas he evidently brought with him from Columbia University’s PhD program. A fat lot of good they did him; for on numerous occasions, Greenspan would laughably refer to inflated home prices as "wealth." He would also tout a supposed investment boom at a time when household savings growth was negative. As every freshman economics student knows, investment cannot exceed savings, and we cannot increase investment unless we cut back on current consumption. And yet, here we were, consuming and borrowing like crazy but still somehow "investing" in the future in defiance of immutable economic law. Bread and Circuses It would seem that most economists these days continue to believe fervently in Greenspan’s monetary Rube Goldberg contraption. Still worse, the charlatans at the central bank who keep it lubricated and running somehow command nearly universal respect. This should probably come as no surprise, given all the bread and circuses that money-from-trees has begotten us. Few seem concerned in any event that as stock market valuations have climbed to insane heights, global debt in its many shapes and forms is approaching two quadrillion dollars. Let me type that out for you: $2,000,000,000,000,000! Most of it is swirling around in derivatives markets that are notionally ten times the size of global trade in real goods

Those who write about such things have attributed virtually every stock-market rally since March 23 to 'vaccine hopes'.  They have overworked and over-hyped this phrase with no sense of irony or awareness; for it is not so much 'hope' that has powered stocks to insane levels, but monetary stimulus pumped liked steroids into a beast that was rabid to begin with.  This is the kind of 'hope' that T-Rex must have felt when it cornered a chubby dinosaur half its size, or that a drug addict might feel after springing the lock on a cartel storage locker filled with white powder.  'Hopeful' is far too modest and gentle an adjective to explain the mass psychosis that has gripped Wall Street over the last ten months. When Bad News Is Bad News Now that a vaccine has finally arrived, however, it is fair to ask what will keep speculators' hopes inflated to infinity.  Under the best imaginable circumstances, it will probably be at least two years before we can look back on the pandemic and marvel at how we finally beat it.  We'll know this has happened when salad bars re-open, subway cars are packed with commuters, and nursing homes welcome visitors with open arms. Does anyone on Wall Street actually believe this is how things are about to play out? More realistically, the stories we will be hearing -- about vaccines that have never been tested on animals or even on significant numbers of humans -- will be scary ones: injection-related deaths, bizarre symptoms, transmission of Covid by the inoculated and the asymptomatic, sterility, vaccine-resistant mutations, inscrutable infection spikes in places locked down like fortresses.  At that point, such hopes as remain will be vested in the central bank and its perceived willingness to step up interventions on bad news.

Stocks have turned timid, although it remains to be seen whether the moderate selling that ended the week will gain momentum as Biden's inauguration approaches.  Regardless, the smell of distribution is in the air, and it is not subtle.  As the tempo of it picks up, expect DaBoyz to work overtime trying to convince us that Wall Street is down with the Democrats. Big Business owns Biden, right? Well, yes and no. It's true that the Silicon Valley muckety-mucks have less to fear from him than from Trump. But there's no getting around the scary fact that this will mark the most radical political change in U.S. history. Most of Biden's appointees are familiar faces from the Obama years, and that has reassured those who hope to benefit from the Democrats' electoral sweep.  But the political checks and balances that existed when Obama was president no longer obtain, and one-party rule could conceivably run amok in ways that Biden's corporate cheerleaders have failed to anticipate. A Fragile Economy For the time being, though, the vaccine program will get most of the attention.  Biden and the Democrats will own it in just a few days, but its success is hardly assured. His procedures and protocols for dealing with the pandemic are unlikely to differ much from Trump's, since there is not enough hard science to justify changing things radically. The danger is that even a small tightening of the lockdown could undo an economy whose fragility has been masked by the powerful bull market in stocks. Do the Democrats understand this?  We may be about to find out. But there should be no illusions in the meantime that the Democrats, cozy as they are with Silicon Valley and social media's opinion-shapers, will be great for stocks.