Free

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.

Bertie slightly overshot  the D target of a corrective pattern on the weekly chart, and so I've retained my focus on a somewhat bearish picture, albeit one that is merely corrective.  The implied, minimum downside target is p2=49,246, and this vehicle would trigger a 'mechanical' short if the current uptrend hits the green line (x=65,609). we'll know before then how likely this is, since a decisive upside pentration of 61,460 would be bullish. It would also shift our minimun upside target for the near term to 69,161. Both of those Hidden Pivot resistances can be found on the weekly chart, where (reverse) a=56,519 on May 3.

I've used a conservative projection even though GDXJ broke out last week, scuttling a bearish reverse pattern.  It nearly touched the 47.98 rally target on Friday, although there's room to 48.29 if you slide 'A' down a tad.  The very shallow retracement that occurred after the top was recorded early in the session is mildly bullish, but the selling would need to continue down to 47.19 to generate a bearish impulse leg on the 5-minute chart.  It would be a minor signal, but it can nonetheless serve sa a hair-trigger warning  of trouble. _______ UPDATE (Jul 16, 6:28 p.m.): Bulls have trashed enough hardy obstacles lately that it's time to shift our focus to a much bigger picture that projects as high as 72.23. Notice that GDXJ ended the week precisely at the most crucial spot on the weekly chart, p=49.02. Let's see what happens before we make an important judgment.

The dollar got hit hard on Thursday, but the weekly chart shown in the thumbnail inset puts it in perspective. DXY has been scuddling sideways since December, and there is scant evidence it will break out of the approximately five-point range in which  it has spent most of 2024. It would pick up voodoo-number support 90 cents below, at 103.18, but sellers would have to pound it through p=100.57 to create even a hint of trouble.  Regardless, D=93.78 is theoretically in play, so we should keep close track of lesser abcd patterns to determine which way the wind is blowing. _______ UPDATE (July 28): Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.