Pull the trigger with confidence.

Everyone wants to be a contrarian, and to go against the crowd.  So the constant quest is to know what the crowd is thinking and doing, so that one can go against it. 

This week’s chart shows the total combined assets held by GLD and IAU, which are the two largest ETFs that are backed by gold bullion.  Normally these asset levels move up and down in step with gold prices.  It gets much more interesting when there is a disagreement, like what we are seeing now.

The pop higher in gold... Read More

Starting in December 2000, the Bureau of Labor Statistics has published what it calls the Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey (JOLTS).  In simple terms, it is a measure of how many job openings there are. 

It has been showing astounding growth ever since the Covid Crash in the spring of 2020.  But just recently, it saw a peak in March 2022 at 11.8 million job openings, and as of May it is down to 11.2 million.  The next JOLTS release is scheduled for August 2, 2022.

The point of this... Read More

If we look at the classic version of the McClellan Volume Summation Index in this week’s chart, then there is some reason for the bulls to have hope.  There is a slight bullish divergence right now, with prices having made a lower low, but the Summation Index has made a slightly higher low (at least for the moment).  But digging deeper, the message gets more complicated.

The Volume Summation Index is very similar to the McClellan A-D Summation Index for which we are more familiar, which is... Read More

The once very stable relationship between the copper/gold ratio and T-Note yields is starting to wobble into an increasingly unstable situation. 

For many years there has been a really reliable relationship between bond yields and the ratio of copper prices to gold prices.  It has been so stable that we can plot the relationship on a chart using a single y-axis, by employing a simple adjustment of multiplying the copper/gold ratio by 1000.  The two plots have been very close to each other... Read More

Crude oil futures prices peaked on June 8, 2022, at a closing price of $122.41/barrel for the near-month contract.  Since then, prices have fallen 24 points to a closing price of 98.13 on July 6.  It is not at all unusual to see such price volatility in the midst of a supply squeeze. 

What is unusual is that we are seeing a similar price drop throughout the crude oil futures market.  Normally a supply squeeze will affect just the near month contract, meaning the one closest to expiration,... Read More

Pessimism is taking over the silver futures market, at least among the small speculators.

In the weekly Commitment Of Traders (COT) Report, published by the CFTC every Friday, traders are broken down into 3 categories:

• Commercial traders, who use the subject commodity in their trade or business
• Non-commercial traders, who are large speculators
• Non-reportable traders, the small speculators

They are referred to as “non-reportable” traders because their position sizes are small... Read More

Last week I wrote about some of the corporate bond Advance-Decline (A-D) data published by FINRA.  The high yield bonds behave more like the stock market than like T-Bonds, and so their behavior can be an indication about liquidity that will come around and affect the stock market.

The investment grade bonds are a different story, and they behave more like T-Bonds.  Their A-D data is still valuable, if interpreted in the right way. 

This week’s chart looks at a Ratio-Adjusted McClellan... Read More

After making an oversold low on May 19, the SP500 had a pretty impressive rebound effort, which included 3 really strong breadth days on May 25-27, 2022.  That got a lot of analysts talking about a “breadth thrust” signal of various flavors.  But the SP500 bonked at a resistance level that had been a prior support level at the March 2022 lows, and after several days it has now fallen back away from that test of the resistance.

Breadth might have been really good looking for the NYSE stocks... Read More