Pull the trigger with confidence.

GLD and IAU are the two largest of the gold bullion exchange traded funds (ETFs).  Not surprisingly, investors like to push money into them and pull money out as gold prices rise and fall.  The real fun comes when investors don’t follow that model.

Gold prices are back up to above $1800/oz, after bottoming below $1700.  But the total combined assets invested into GLD and IAU has barely budged from the recent lows.  That is actually a bullish development for gold prices, because it means... Read More

There is a dominant cycle in gold prices with a period of 13-1/2 months.  But its behavior is more complicated than just saying that gold makes a bottom every 13-1/2 months. 

The first interesting aspect of this cycle is that around the time of the cycle’s peak, gold usually makes a mid-cycle low, like a camel with 2 humps.  Even more interesting is the point that the arrangement of the tops on either side of that mid-cycle low gives us information about what lies ahead.

In a case of... Read More

I have been writing professionally about the financial markets since 1995, and in all of that time I have almost never referenced valuation.  It is not because valuation does not matter, but rather that valuation does not give any useful insights to solve my puzzles about what the market is going to do and when.  Valuations can get way more stretched than they ought to, in both directions, and so noticing that they are stretched (or not) is of really no functional use.

Stretched valuations... Read More

The lumber futures market is a pretty thin market, with only around 3,000 contracts open.  Compare that to the eMini SP500 futures contract, which has 2.6 million contracts open.  In lumber futures, a single small order can move the market.  So anyone who decides he wants to trade lumber futures better know what he is getting into.

We have seen an amazing blowoff in lumber futures prices recently, with the May contract rising for 15 straight days recently.  That string was part of a larger... Read More

The Nasdaq 100 Index (NDX) is finally back to making new all-time highs, something that the SP500 has been doing more regularly in 2021.  The NDX suffered a painful dip in February 2021, as big tech suddenly fell out of favor.  Now those stocks are back in favor once again. 

This week’s chart shows an indicator which measures how many of the NDX stocks are above their own 100-day simple moving averages (100MA).  When I first set out in 1999 to compile all of the data to compute this... Read More

Indicators like the McClellan Summation Index can tell us a lot by the level they get to.  But they can also tell us a lot based on the patterns they show, or in some cases the patterns they don’t show. 

A “smooth” move in the Summation Index is one that is nearly linear, and it conveys a message about strength for the direction of the move.  So in the case of this week’s chart, we see smooth sustained up moves.

We also see some bumpy down moves.  Bumpiness is an indication of weakness... Read More