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The spread between permabulls and permabears is at an extreme these days, even for October. This is the month when pessimists' hopes are highest that an epic bear market will correct dangerous excesses that have been building up in the financial system for more than 50 years. A presumptive and welcome side effect of such a crash is that it would reset things in accordance not with the designs of nefarious plotters, schemers and conspirators who meet every year in Davos, but in a more natural way that inflicts pain on borrowers and financial evildoers more or less in proportion to their sins. We permabears should be careful what we wish for, however, since deep hardship affecting the broad middle class, the poor and even the very affluent could persist for a long time -- perhaps a decade or more as occurred after the Crash of 1929. It is particularly troubling to consider that it took a world war in which 50 million people died to end the Great Depression rather than persistent fiscal and monetary meddling by the government. Anyone who thinks the Fed will ultimately lift us from the economic abyss into which we are about to descend should recognize that it is the banksters who will have put us there. The Death of Wokeness Meanwhile, it is unsurprising that some top technical forecasters disagree vehemently over what lies just ahead. One who sits in the pantheon of chartists says that, for cyclical reasons, the stock market is about to embark on a major rally. A colleague achieved instant success -- soon to become notoriety? -- with his own cycles-based forecast calling for a crash starting this week and continuing until the November election. Although I fear that a severe crash is coming that will tip the U.S.

Last week's low just pennies beneath my 134.59 target would be an unlikely place for a good bottom, as a glance at the chart suggests. The stock will want to test the June low at 129.04 to bolster confidence for the next significant bear rally. We'll be on the alert to catch a ride north, but it's liable to take work and patience, since AAPL could noodle around down there for days or even weeks, stopping out bulls with so many false starts that they'll eventually give up. There's $9 of potential downside to exploit along the way, but that too will require close monitoring of the lesser charts. A 'voodoo' number at 131.41 looks promising for catching a tradeable bounce, so be ready when AAPL gets there. ______ UPDATE (Oct 17, 9:05 p.m.): AAPL's opportunistic leaps on the opening are by now so familiar that we should be shocked if DaBoyz ever attempt this money-saving trick with honest-to-goodness buying. Today's headbutting precisely at p=142.74 confirmed the pattern and its target, 147.19. Consider it a done deal if buyer's fist-pump their way past p, especially in the early going. An unexpected pullback to x=140.52, the green line, would trip an attractive 'mechanical' buy, stop 138.28. _______ UPDATE (Oct 18, 8:40 p.m.): The stock's handlers  let go of the leash, but it only seemed like they'd lost control. AAPL finished with a riskless/costless gain, leaving a classic 'mechanical' buy at the green line. I must confess that I was elsewhere at the time.

Don't get your hopes up that gold is going to make an important bottom any time soon. It had a chance to do so with the robust leap it took on September 28 from within a millimeter of the 1619 Hidden Pivot target shown in the chart. But the subsequent rally, which took a week to play out, fell just shy of a 1646 peak recorded three weeks earlier, narrowly failing to create an impulse leg of daily-chart degree. It would have been the first such occurrence in eight months and a welcome sign for beleaguered bulls. Alas, more disappointment seems likely if the December contract drops below 1619. That would turn the would-be impulse leg into a merely corrective one, sending gold groping for a bottom at, best case, 1600.

As last week ended, crude was poised to slip into a vast void beneath two important 'structural' supports that lie, respectively, at 85.56 and 85.42. The November contract briefly traded beneath the lower of these numbers on Friday, but the subsequent bounce has been too weak so far to suggest it will hold aloft. There is no support between here and around 81.20, the approximate middle of a consolidation zone creating at the end of September. There a crucial test awaits, since further slippage into the $70s would undermine bullish confidence, such as it is.

Much of the dollar's rise this year has taken place with stochastic indicators extremely overbought, a common trait of powerful, enduring rallies. That's why the 117.17 target shown is likely to be hit before a significant correction sets in.  The pattern has signaled two winning trades - a short from p2=114.80 and a 'mechanical' buy at x=110.05 -- implying shorts from 117.17 would enjoy similar success. That is notwithstanding the pattern's obviousness. We don't typically trade this vehicle, but because it affects everything else, we monitor it closely. A strong dollar threatens to unravel the Fed's crackpot schemes and asphyxiate debtors both big and small around the world who owe dollars. _______ UPDATE (Oct 17, 9:18 p.m.): D=111.71 is my minimum downside objective, but this Hidden Pivot support must hold if bulls are to regain dominance. Here's the chart. _______ UPDATE (Oct 19, 10:20 p.m.): DXY has taken a robust bounce from 111.77, six cents above the target flagged above. This is encouraging, but the rally would need to surpass the 113.42 peak recorded last Friday for the dollar to get back on a roll.

A pen-pal from the world of very high-tech inventions is a self-described 'collapsitarian'. He wrote me recently to say he enjoys these weekly screeds for their relentlessly glum insightfulness. (For your information, he is 50% in cash, 25% in gold, and 25% short stocks.) Longtime readers will know that I seldom shout 'The Sky Is Falling!!' in a headline. Rather, the not-so-great news is dispensed matter-of-factly in the final sentence or two, where you are admonished to reef the sails, batten the hatches and retreat below. And if the vessel should pitchpole, leaving one badly shaken and crawling on the galley ceiling, what then?  Prepare for the 100-foot rogue wave yet to hit is about all I can advise. That's what I see coming, "probably" sooner rather than later. The disaster seems all too likely to arrive in the form of an unscheduled bank holiday that touches off a fatal spasm of debt deflation. I often reiterate in that final paragraph, matter-of-factly, that deflation is inevitable because, well, because it is. I've been writing about this-- some would say bloviating -- for long enough to have annoyed more than a few readers. One was upset about a particularly gloomy column I'd written 25 years ago for the San Francisco Examiner. He told me he managed $250 million and asked what qualified me to predict such a scary future. I responded by critiquing some minor errors of grammar and punctuation in his email. He shut me down with an unexpected reply. It turns out the $250 million was his personal money, and English was just one of six languages he, a cosmopolitan Iranian, spoke fluently. Our subsequent exchanges became increasingly friendly, and I never even asked how he'd fared with the enormous stake he'd amassed in Nokia. The Broken Clock Others

Friday's refreshing death dive may have felt like the start of something big, but the chart suggests we'd probably have been buyers at the close. The 106-point selloff hit the green line after topping midway between p2 and D, generating a classic 'mechanical' buy signal that we've seen work again and again. This is not to say the rally we can expect on Monday will necessarily reach D=3846.75, only that getting long at the green line (stop 3571.75) would probably have been a good bet for at least a one-level ride to p=3709.25. That's a nearly $14,000 opportunity, but we passed it up because staking out a position in the final hour of a Friday is courting trouble and not how we roll. ______ UPDATE (Oct 10, 11:06 p.m.): Although the 'mechanical' buy at 3640.50 (stop 3571.50) remains nominally alive, today's dirge killed my interest in the trade early in the session. (See my post at 12:50.) For their part, sellers did nothing to brag about. They will win on Tuesday, though, unless DaBoyz can gin up some "news" to trigger off a short squeeze.  ______ UPDATE (Oct 13, 5:05 p.m.): Use this pattern to make tradable sense of today's lunatic bounce, an affront and disgrace to civilization itself.  Although there is little meaning to any statistical news we read these days, traders evidently feel obliged to go nuts with it, even if no one can say whether the news will prove bullish or bearish. Today they interpreted it both ways by turns, but don't expect the psychotic rally that ended the day to get very far, even if it exceeds D=3750.25 (corrected) in an ultimately doomed attempt to fool patient bears.

AAPL's brutal tumble on Friday looked bound at the close for a minimum 137.83, the 'secondary' Hidden Pivot in the thumbnail chart.  Because this price point coincides with a key low recorded on last Monday's opening, sellers are unlikely to go for the gusto (i.e., D=134.59) until they've experienced a failed rally attempt from p2.  A plunge in the first 30 minutes to p2=137.83 should be viewed as a buying opportunity, especially if you can craft a low-risk trigger using a tight rABC pattern with an a-b leg of no m ore than 20 cents. _____ UPDATE (Oct 13, 4:27 p.m.): The 134.59 target drum-rolled above nailed the low of a nearly 7% bounce that is one of the biggest ever for this stock in a single day. Only one subscriber commented on this -- he said he made money on the way down -- further affirming that subscribers have almost no interest in this stock.  I get where you're at, but I will continue to track AAPL anyway because, as I like to remind you constantly, it is the only stock that matters: Get AAPL right, and you get the stock market right. In fact, you could have made money buying anything today when AAPL was bottoming within 22 cents (i.e., two-tenths of one percent) of the billboarded target.  Here's a snapshot of the Masters of the Universe adding hundreds of billions of dollars to the world's store of "wealth" by goosing the stock into thin air.

Gold rallied on two consecutive days last week, but I'd caution against getting your hopes too high. For one, the rally occurred off a 1622 low that bearishly exceeded the 'D' target of a clear and compelling downtrending pattern. For two, the down-leg that created that low is strongly impulsive, having exceeded no fewer than three important 'internal' lows recorded since early in 2021.  That implies that this rally is merely corrected and should be viewed as such unless it exceeds the 1824.60 'external' peak from August 12. And thirdly, the futures missed a crystal-clear 1750 rally target before turning down last week. That said, the hourly chart remains mildly bullish and can be traded with that bias, especially if buyers get second wind and push the December contract above September 12's 1746 peak this week. _______ UPDATE (Oct 13, 5:30): Yeah sure, that was the bottom.