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If you can keep a cool head while everyone around you is panicking, perhaps you don't understand the situation. That's what they say, anyway. It is exactly what we saw last week when stocks barely shrugged even as the shooting war in the Middle East took another baby step toward nuclear conflagration. The oil markets certainly recognized the danger, spiking sharply after our titular president warned that Israeli warplanes might soon start targeting Iran's refineries. Energy quotes scored their biggest weekly gain in years while stocks, although relatively subdued, appeared to consolidate for yet another psychotic upthrust. What seemed to matter most on Wall Street was not the threat of cities going up in flames, but a few meaningless, cooked job stats implying that droplets of juice from America's financial bacchanal have begun to trickle into the parched gullets of gig workers, nurses and cocktail waitresses (if not yet retail clerks). Longshoremen could join them shortly with a 62% raise to $69 an hour, including the union's legendary no-shows.  It's a little late in the Kondratief cycle for them to become rentiers, but the prospect of owning a few shares of Nvidia seems realistic enough. Although keeping up with the Joneses has gotten easier because the Joneses' inflation-adjusted net worth has been stagnant for 50 years, chasing inflation has only grown harder. And that's measured against phony data that understate inflation by half.  Take heart, all you working stiffs: beating inflation is going to be a cakewalk when the next recession brings it down to, like, minus five percent. What About Microsoft? Speaking of recession, this IBM chart, even to the unschooled eye, suggests the Beamer may be about to reverse in a big way. Although I have never tracked the company's shares closely, there may be a few old-timers

The pattern shown makes the 5868.50 target look like it can't miss. But it will, if not by much. It is too obvious a picture to yield a precise top and a sharp pullback from D that causes permabears to dance in the streets. Everyone is aware of this ABCD, even the math majors, and the mere anticipation of its final gasp is all but certain to queer D's voodoo stopping-power. But the pattern's Newtonian heft is also compelling -- so much so that the futures are unlikely to get past D without a struggle if at all. One thing that is all but certain is that D is going to be reached before the Fat Lady can sing. The way buyers fisted p=5518.75 the first time they encountered this midpoint Hidden Pivot tells us that. Whatever happens, we'll be looking to short a topping process rather than a top. Stay close to the chat room and keep your email 'Notifications' turned on if you don't fancy being outsmarted by this creaky ship of fools.

TLT's tortuous ascent still looks bound for 105.49, a Hidden Pivot target derived from a bull cycle that dates back to October 2023, when this proxy for the long bond was trading around 82. A corresponding fall in long-term rates would bring them down to 3.64%. The trajectory of both charts suggests the targets could be reached by late this year or early in 2025. It is logical to infer that a recession would be well under way with rates at those levels since the Fed could not conceivably force them down by purchasing massive amounts of Treasury debt. Foreigners could do the job for them if there is a global flight to safety for reasons beyond imagining,

I've hauled out a long-term chart commensurate with the ones displayed alongside this week's gold and silver touts. It shows GDXJ to be slightly ahead of the futures in a precious-metals bull market that has years to run. A close look at the rightmost bar reveals that it has slightly pierced the midpoint Hidden Pivot resistance of a pattern projecting to 72.73, a 45% move from here. With one more day to go in September, there's a good chance the monthly close will be above p. A second close above the pivot in October would shorten the odds that 72.73 will be achieved, but so would an upthrust to 54 or higher. That target is not the highest possible using the monthly chart; a reverse-pattern objective of 111.59 is arguable, using a= 84.72 from 2/26/10.

The Dollar Index is breaking down following a six-week struggle to hold above 100. Support came more precisely at the 100.57 Hidden Pivot midpoint of the pattern shown, a nearly two-year downtrend that portends more downside to as low as 93.78. Since the dollar was barely able to hold the support with Powell unwilling to ease, it is logical for it to be weakening now that he has decided to go with the global flow. He can't possibly win the devaluation Olympiad, nor would he attempt it. But he has doubtless calculated that the dollar will not get kicked too savagely as long as so many other countries are trashing their currencies.

Two days of hard selling pushed the November contract down to the green line (x=66.97), triggering a 'mechanical' buy (stop 64.41)  that should be good for a one-level ride, at least, to p=69.52.  With pump prices down at $3 or even lower, exchange quotes should start to firm, since that's what they've done for years every time motorists got relief for a few weeks. Election-year tampering could suppress whatever rally is coming, however, along with extraordinary complacency in the face of possible war in the Middle East or Europe.

Expect stocks to continue their heedless waft into outer space until the election. They would not likely do so if investors even remotely imagined Kamala Harris might win. James Kunstler provided the most succinct reason we've heard for why this is not going to happen:  "The people in this land are finally sick of a faceless blob ruling madly from the shadows," he wrote in the current edition of Clusterfuck Nation. "Mr. Trump has become a national father figure, a titanic offense to a party run by women with daddy issues and to their Marxist allies dogmatically bent on destroying the family (along with every other institution). As it happens, countries need fathers, both actual and symbolic. What a surprise!" So what about polls that show Harris and Trump neck-and-neck in some swing states? Even ostensibly conservative news outlets such as Fox and the Wall Street Journal have been reporting this as though the data were authentic. My guess is that the editors and news gatherers have all been overwhelmed by the nation's left-tilting news media into believing polls that have been massaged with poor sampling, misleading questions and purposeful misinterpretation. In reality, the believers are like the audience assembled on a barge to witness David Copperfield make the Statue of Liberty disappear.  Although some in the audience would swear this happened, it didn't; the barge had simply been repositioned while a curtain was raised to obscure a large swath of the horizon. 8%-10% More Believable Although the magician eventually revealed how he did the trick, the New York Times et al. will not be called upon to explain how they levitated Ms. Harris, since she is going to lose by 20 million votes. That's a realistic number if forecaster Martin Armstrong is right, as he often is about so

The glue-sniffers who pushed the S&Ps an inch above July's record high on Thursday, only to recede from this precipice like frightened sandpipers from a rising tide, may never realize this was just the bunch of them staring at themselves in Wall Street's fun-house mirror.  This coy behavior was so predictable that we might wonder whether all of them made a bundle coming in short on Friday. Of course not. But they are certain to spend the coming week bumping into each other like a throng of mental patients locked in a small room. I'll be watching their burlesque over the next few days, so stay close to the chat room and your email Notifications if you want a seat at ringside.

I've given the 449.52 rally target so much ink that it's probably time to fixate on a higher Hidden Pivot just in case. It lies at 464.76, which, because of its close proximity to July's 468.35 record, should not be expected to show precise stopping power. Still, it will lie in the bowel of what we should regard as the 'discomfort zone', just shy of the bullish breakout that nearly everyone will be expecting, Whatever hysterical price action this causes will assuredly be tradable, since it is all just impulse legs. However, I will be focused more attentively on movement above the old high, since that would create favorable psychological conditions for the kind of bull trap that wants to take everybody down with it.