bullion

Bullion prices have been ratcheting lower in recent weeks, presumably bound for key midpoint supports that could conceivably fail. Although it's difficult to be disinterested in the outcome, we need to view the technical signs with coldly mechanical detachment. Indeed, our emotions will not serve us well in judging a market that has been going against us, as bullion has. With the foregoing in mind, and for better or worse, we took an especially close look at Comex Gold during this session.

I've projected higher prices for shares and bullion  today, but you should pay close heed to the precise price points given -- all Hidden Pivots -- to get a precise idea of how much strength is pushing the rallies.

Index futures and bullion were getting beaten up tonight, but it looked more like a Sunday night shakedown than real fear driving the selling. In any event, there are some precise numbers you can use to determine this for yourself, presumably before the opening bell.

Rick’s Picks occasionally publishes opinions with which we disagree. The inflationist argument below, bullish on stocks but also on gold and silver, comes from our savvy friend Chuck Cohen. On stocks, at least, if not on bullion, Chuck’s scenario goes against our own expectations, since we’re looking for a global economic bust that would send shares into a steep dive before year's end. While this could also push gold and silver lower, we still expect precious metals to perform well in relation to all other classes of investables. Economic expectations aside, the broad averages have broken above the tedious sideways correction of the last six weeks, and the charts of many key stocks are undeniably bullish. There are also less-than-subtle signs that the Fed is eager to get QE3 under way with the explicit goal of pumping up stock prices.  Keep these things in mind as you read Chuck’s contrarian take on the markets – a follow-up to a piece he did two weeks ago that we disseminated to paid subscribers.  If you’d like to contact Chuck directly about his financial consulting services, or about mining stocks in particular, click here. RA] Following the recent move up in stocks, I want to update my piece of October 4 (A Bottom Is At Hand) by making some comments regarding stocks, and more importantly to the gold community, about the disappointing lag in the precious metals. First, the stock market. In just two weeks, while the media and most investors continue to dwell gloomily on the financial landscape, the Dow has recaptured almost 1400 points (13%.) Today we are closer to the April high than we are to the recent low. In fact, both the market behavior and the Dow chart are remarkably similar to those of last year at the bottom in August. (The

If you're in the habit of fading the trend on a quiet Sunday night, you'd be long index futures and short bullion at the moment, shortly before 11 p.m. EDT.  Silver seems to be holding gold back, but we needn't speculate on the outcome, since there are clear Hidden Pivot benchmarks to tell us which side, bulls or bears, is controlling the action.

Shortly before 2 a.m. in New York, bullion futures were screwing the pooch while index futures were plodding joylessly toward yet another bullish target.  As I implied here earlier, the new October Surprise is... "No Surprise!"

Bullion futures were screwing the pooch shortly after midnight EDT, showing no inclination to convert small impulse legs into bigger ones.  Night owls should check out the chart that accompanies today's Silver tout, since it shows how very subtle camouflage trading opportunities are at the moment. There's not much to leverage here, since the follow-through push we should expect after a good 'camo' entry may be constrained at the moment by buyers' unwillingness to take on any intraday peaks of size .

Bullion and the broad averages were nearly comatose when we looked in on them this morning, so we spent the hour, not hunting for the usual, easy trades, but peeling back layers of visual clues to see how we might have jumped into some losers. The Dollar Index in particular proved fertile ground for mistakenness. Students may find themselves agreeing that the way in which we were able to find, in retrospect, a rationale for having avoided trouble is one of the subtler teachable moments in the recorded library.

[Addendum: I misread the date on Lira's piece -- his blog is not one of my regular stops on the Web --  and it turns out that it was written a year ago in August, not last month as erroneously noted. As readers may have surmised, however, that does not weaken or change my argument.  Nor would I claim that it weakens his, notwithstanding the fact that a prediction he made  more than a year has not panned out.  There is a lot of ruin in a global financial system, and although it sometimes seems as though ours may be no more than days from collapse, we all know how even terminal economic dysfunction, like lung cancer, can persist without producing the expected result. RA] With deflation tightening its choke-hold on the global economy, we thought we’d drop in on our supposed nemesis, Gonzalo Lira, to see how he has been coping in these very un-hyperinflationary times.  To his credit, the erstwhile arch-inflationist, bending to reality, has acknowledged forthrightly that deflation rules the economic and financial worlds right now. “Yields are  low, unemployment up, CPI numbers are down (and under some metrics, negative) – in short, everything screams ‘deflation.’ ” He wrote those words a month ago in an essay entitled How Hyperinflation Will Happen, and although we are obliged to point out certain dangers in relying too heavily on the scenario he describes, readers should trust, as we do, that he has gotten the big picture right.  He asserts, for one, that economic recovery is no longer remotely possible for the U.S.  We agree. Nor, as he makes clear, is it a case of double-dipping into recession, as most economists and the mainstream media would have it;  as Lira flatly states, we never emerged from the first recession. The inevitable result, he says – and again we concur -- is that an epic financial panic centered