Free

While the broad averages were getting pounded last week, bitcoin's deft handlers were displaying the kind of brash confidence that all but guarantees significantly higher prices -- and soon, especially if stocks continue to recover. Use p=71,394 as a minimum upside projection for the near term, and expect this hoax to punch through this Hidden Pivot with little difficulty. That would shorten the odds of a finishsing stroke to the 89,029 target flagged here earlier.

September Silver took a tentative bounce from the launcher last Thursday, but it will need to close above the pink line at 28.82 to be considered airborne. The reverse pattern shown is both compelling and obscure, so d=27.41 stood to work precisely. Is the reversal from 14 cents above that Hidden Pivot sufficiently precise to infer the downtrend is spent? Probably. But if the futures relapse this week, be ready to bottom-fish voodoo 27.05 with a trigger interval as tight as a dime. ______ UPDATE (Jul 29, 6:13 p.m.): The futures relapsed, all right, but only enough to get them even closer to my 27.41 target. Is the new low at 27.45 close enough?  The question is no longer worth pondering, but you should be long if you used the suggested trigger interval, with a partial profit from the 60-cent move that has occurred so far.

Crude's so far $1.35 bounce from within 7 cents of the 76.26 target I'd flagged suggests the rally is likely to get legs, so don't be fooled if this vicious little sonofabitch fakes a low beneath Friday's 76.19 bottom before it takes off.  This could set up a 'counterintuitive' trigger for Pivoteers who are familiar with the technique, which is the forerunner of the reverse-pattern set-up. Since no forecast should be chiseled in stone, let's remain open to the possibility that the low will be broken decisively. If that occurs, assume DaBoy are fixing to crush quotes.

Last week's correction has further to go before buyers could step in without risking much. A pullback to the green line (x=5422) would trigger a 'mechanical' buy, although there are no guarantees we'll be gifted with such a bargain price.  More interestingly, neither can there be any guarantees that the next big rally will reach the 5881 target shown in the chart. Had the uptrend impaled p=5575 a month ago on the way up, a finishing stroke to 5881 would be more or less asssured. However, price action at p was muffled, and it took fully three weeks before buyers were able to push past it decisively. That is a cautionary sign, even in a bull market that has been as strong and steady as this one.

Bertie is a lock-up to reach the 69,161 target shown, but it will need to close for two consecutive weeks above 71,395 to put an 89,029 'D' target in play. It goes with this pattern, and it is the highest projection I've identified that is tied to Hidden Pivot levels. It is curious that bitcoin rose so sharply in a week that featured heavy selling in the S&Ps and the tech stocks. I can't imagine that the King of Cryptos would be considered a safe-haven asset, but if so, then perhaps the End of Times is nearer than we'd thought.

Three successive, marginally higher tops in the last three months have made this vehicle more than a little tiresome. The futures will need to come down to at least p=2352.00 of this latest, bullish pattern before we can get a confident read on how long the tedium might last before gold blasts off toward 3000. We might be able to determine trend strength accurately as early as Monday or Tuesday by looking at patterns going in either direction on the lesser charts, so stay tuned.

Bears shouldn't get their hopes too high just because the S&P 500 plummeted for three straight days last week. The selloff seemed tightly scripted, given that the Dow Industrials were rising just as sharply at least part of that time. This is shown in the chart above, which captures price action on Thursday. The implication is that portfolio managers were simply shifting money from one simmering vat to another, an efficient way to keep stocks bubbling without expending much capital. Someday their ingenious siphon pump will be overwhelmed by honest-to-goodness selling. You'll know the weakness is real because it will last for three or more days, it will encompass all of the broad indexes, and it will gain in momentum. Three straight days of selling has been an extremely rare occurrence since this gaseous bull run began in March 2020, just before the covid hoax laid seige to the U.S. economy. But four days? You'd have to go back many years to find an instance of this. Lessons to Unlearn Even the 1987 crash didn't last for three full days. It began on the afternoon of Friday, October 16, but by mid-morning on Tuesday, October 19, selling had dried up and stocks were poised to come roaring back. Bears who were slow to cover short positions got savaged almost as badly as bulls who'd been trapped in the initial avalanche. The downtrend had drawn enormous power from huge open positions in far-out-of-the-money put options. For years, selling them 'naked' was considered a reliable source of free money. But when stocks started to fall hard on that fateful Friday, the ordinarily docile puts turned into a water-cannon enema for short sellers. Traders learned their lesson, and more than a few of my colleagues in the pits of the Pacific Stock Exchange

Stories about San Francisco's death appear to have been exaggerated. I arrived there Saturday for a five-week stay, a getaway from Florida's insufferable summer heat. It didn't take me long to recall why, at age 28, I came to San Francisco and stayed until I was 50. For one, the weather rarely turns hot, even when the rest of the country is sweltering.  And on those rare occasions when a heat wave descends on the city, there is always an ocean of fog lurking just outside the Golden Gate, ready to pour onto the streets whenever high temperatures linger for more than a few days. It was an invigorating 65 degrees when I stepped off a JetBlue plane at SFO on Saturday morning. I'd departed Ft. Lauderdale shortly after sunrise with the thermostat already climbing into the mid-80s and humidity approaching steam-bath levels. Arriving in San Francisco was like encountering the crystal blue ice of a Norwegian fjord. I was greeted by an old friend who has been a player for decades on the periphery of the commercial real estate market. He contends that most of the negative press the city gets is just flackery employed by developers to drive down prices. Not only have they succeeded at this, they have begun to seed long-neglected warehouse districts with large sums of money, turning them into magnets for tech entrepreneurs, residential developers, skilled tradesmen and mostly-Asian workers who earn $300,000 or more per year with their extraordinary STEM skills. So many luxury apartments have sprung up to house these young whizzes that I didn't realize at first that I was in my old Portrero Hill neighbohood, which sits literally on the other side of the railroad tracks, about a mile south of downtown San Francisco. Eldorado's Infrastructure The drive took us

TLT is taking its sweet old time getting airborne, and even surmounting the small distance remaining to p=96.42 cannot be assumed. The last upward stab failed to take out any external peaks, and that is an additional factor to consider. My gut feeling is that the October 2023 low at 82.42 was a major one and that it will endure for the foreseeable future. Regardless, we'll need to see a strong push past p=96.42 the first time buyers encounter it in order to infer that the D target at 105.49 is likely to be achieved.