Pull the trigger with confidence.

If this were a “normal” 2nd year of a presidential term, we would now be in a corrective period due to last until just before the mid-term elections.  But as many in the press have noted, we do not have a “normal” presidency, and the market is not tracing out a perfect normal pattern. 

Years ago, I first constructed a Presidential Cycle Pattern by averaging together multiple years’ worth of data on the SP500.  One difference I chose to make in this process, versus the work of others, is... Read More

Back in January, I introduced readers to the revelation that all throughout 2017, the DJIA had been following in the footsteps of Bitcoin prices, with a lag time of about 8 weeks (56 calendar days).  And it continues working even now, albeit with a slight adjustment.

Why would this relationship work?  My answer is that there are cycles of human emotion which affect our collective attraction to and repulsion from speculative investments like the stock market.  It appears that those same... Read More

The ratio of gold prices versus silver prices is now up to the type of high reading that in the past 2 decades has marked an important low for both gold and silver prices. 

The value of anything is always and in every case a ratio.  Most often the units are expressed as dollars per ounce, dollars per bushel, dollars per share, etc.  But expressing the price of an ounce of gold as being equivalent to 80 ounces of silver is perfectly legitimate.  We can understand the implications of the... Read More

If you are a gold investor, then the one thing you want most is rising deficits.  Luckily for you, Congress appears to have granted just what you want.

This week’s chart compares the trailing 12-month federal deficit (as a percentage of GDP) to gold prices.  The correlation is not perfect, but it is pretty good over time.  The implication is that rising deficits should be bullish for gold prices.

That certainly was the case during the 2000s, following the supposed surpluses of the late... Read More

There is a very strong seasonal pattern in the way that tax receipts come into the federal government.  The nice thing about that regularity is that it allows us to easily compare how the current year is doing versus past years.

In this week’s chart, the black line represents the calendar year 2018 total federal receipts, as detailed in the Monthly Treasury Statement, or MTS.  What we find is that 2018’s receipts are running pretty similar to those of the past 4 years.

This is an... Read More

Make me Emperor for a day, and I would compel the FOMC to outsource interest rate policy to the bond market.  Why should we pay 12 experts, most with expensive Ivy League PhD degrees, to do what the bond market can do far more efficiently (and cheaply)?

This week’s chart compares the 2-year T-Note yield to the stated Fed Funds target rate.  The FOMC has actually said that the target rate is 1.5% to 1.75%, so I’m splitting the difference by calling it 1.625%.  What this chart shows is that... Read More

The stock market is continuing to display a weird backwards rerun of its own behavior 9 years ago.  I wrote about this here back on Jan. 18, 2018, in a Chart In Focus article titled, “Ending How It Began (Parabolically)?”.  That was just a week before the stock market’s blowoff top.  So it is time for a review of how things have turned out since then. 

Just so you understand what this week’s chart is showing, what I have done is taken the black-line plot of the DJIA, and rotated it around... Read More

Earlier this month, the technical analysis community mourned the passing of Richard Arms, the creator of the eponymous Arms Index.  You can read an obituary by Jonathan Arter here.  I met him a few years ago and had corresponded with him, and I can tell you that he was not only a brilliant chartist, he was also a really nice guy.  He was happy to share his insights with others. 

The Arms Index is sometimes referred to as “TRIN”, short for TRading INdex.  TRIN was the old Reuters screen... Read More