The Year The World Fell Down The Rabbit Hole

Conspiracies and bias hurt investors. It’s no wonder so many people have been unable to attain proper market positioning in 2020. You invest with your heart, soul, fears, or even sometimes your intellect and you risk blowing yourself up at worst, or missing out at best. For much of 2020 Twitter has been a forum for ‘influencers’ with tens of thousands of followers spewing dogma and influencing their herds alright. I watched it happen all year, in the Twitter machine and at other venues.

You know the perma-bearish or ‘got gold?’ types, issuing dire warnings and authoritative discussion of just how bad off the world is (well, it ain’t good, I grant them that). But it’s the practical reaction or lack thereof, not the news itself that matters.

So Warren Buffett bought a gold stock. The gold “community” immediately seized upon it as validation and an opportunity to lecture the herds. What it actually was though, was a top prior to a healthy and much-needed correction (handily, right from our long-standing target of HUI 375).

Buffett Buys a Gold Stock! Continue reading "The Year The World Fell Down The Rabbit Hole"

Chart Analysis: A Bigger Picture View Of HUI

In NFTRH we did a lot of work managing the oncoming correction, the valid reasons behind it (these reasons are beyond the scope of this post but don’t listen to the perma-bulls, they were more than valid and readable in advance), the now nearly 5-month-old correction (technically still intact) and more recently the improved risk vs. reward after HUI hit our long-standing ‘best’ target of 280 +/-.

There is another downside target at 260 +/- but it may just be time for the drudgery (AKA consolidation/correction to bleed out the excesses) to end. The answer to confirm that will be left to ongoing work we do on shorter time frames, including daily charts in the weekly report and in-week updates. But for this post, I want to take a perspective look at HUI’s weekly chart.

This is an old chart we used to manage the previous bull market top and long road down to the depths of the bear, in lockdown by the 55 week EMA. With the excitement happening during FOMC week, as the Fed tells us all what we already knew (it’s funny munny for as far as the eye can see, or at least as long as the Continuum permits) it pays to have some bigger picture perspective while positioning.

I think it is a notable, if minor, positive that Huey has so far held the EMA 55 for the first time on the way up as it had held below it during the worst of the bear market on the way down. It never hurts to see things rhyme when using TA. Of more importance, HUI has held the first layer of support on the predictable pullback from all too clear resistance at 375 (a target we had loaded since mid-2019).

The 260 +/- target also includes strong weekly chart support and until the downward consolidation from Continue reading "Chart Analysis: A Bigger Picture View Of HUI"

Metals Ratios Continue To Indicate Inflation

And that is welcome for monetary and fiscal policymakers of course since inflation is the only trick they have up their sleeve to bail this mess out once again. And this is no comment on COVID-19. The economy was slowly decelerating last year well before COVID-19 showed up.

The yield curve bottomed and turned up in August of 2019 as manufacturing was slipping, long-term yields were tanking and other economic signals were fraying in the wake of the trade war. So please, no convenient COVID excuses.

See: Yield Curve Hits New 2019 Steepener Today

They were preparing to inflate because the Continuum told them to prepare. COVID-19 dropped the final hammer on the situation and brought the inflation on quicker and more intensely than might have otherwise been the case.

30 year yield

So anyway, on to the lovable Amigos. Continue reading "Metals Ratios Continue To Indicate Inflation"

Bitcoin: My 1 Reason Why

MarketWatch used to pick up my posts on rare occasion but has not done so for a long time. Maybe they think I make fun of some of their articles or something. I don’t know what would give them that idea. I actually find MarketWatch useful in ironic and non-ironic ways.

But anyway, this morning an article tags along with the recent near-deafening Bitcoin noise…

6 reasons bitcoin is trading at its highest level since 2017 — and 1 warning

6 reasons are given for Bitcoin’s re-found popularity. They are the usual pap, including a Dollar/Gold rationalization.

“Bitcoin as a form of digital gold is also seeing its time in the sun as we see the floodgates open on monetary policy. Closing the sluice gate is more difficult than opening it,” Charles Hayter, founder and CEO of CryptoCompare, a company engaged in bitcoin data and analytics, told MarketWatch.

Bitcoin is not a form of digital gold. That is one of the zaniest things I’ve ever seen in print. I am admittedly an old fashioned gold valuing curmudgeon. But in my opinion, Bitcoin is a digital concept; one that I think can be controlled or co-opted by governments more readily than the gold buried in the woods behind some crusty old bug’s shack (to boot, the digital kids are not guarding their hoards with physical shotguns, just maybe virtual hacks or viruses).

1 Reason Why

It was time. Bitcoin is having its technical day in the sun and only this week hit the target NFTRH has had for it since early 2020. Due to nutty rationale like the above and the weight of momentum-fueled money starting to pile in, not to mention an overbought reading on this weekly chart, I think it can pull back here. Possibly to support at the 12500-13500 level. Continue reading "Bitcoin: My 1 Reason Why"

United States Still Going Bananas

You see, it’s not a Trump thing. It’s an ‘America is so hopelessly indebted (as are other developed economies) that they have no choice now’ thing.

However, the election shakes out – most likely Democrat president and congress, Republican senate – the stock market is cheering two things in my opinion. It is cheering US dollar compromising fiscal stimulus (Fed prints, politicians spend) and the coming of more US dollar compromising monetary policy (Fed prints, Fed monetizes bonds AKA debt, Fed screws with any other esoteric tool it can get its hands on in the age of MMT TMM, AKA Total Market Manipulation).

I have a still profitable position against the Euro that is about to tick un-profitable this morning. That was my hedge against a firming US dollar, which is the anti-market to the US stock market especially, but also to many global markets because I am long US and global stocks. I may have to pull back to hedging stocks (including gold stocks) with high cash levels. So says the ongoing inflationary operation.

I had projected an A-B-C bear market bounce in Uncle Buck, just to keep the macro honest and put a spook into market bulls. But it appears – due to the joy breaking out everywhere – that I will have been wrong about ‘C’. That’s what this breakdown below support (now short-term resistance) says, anyway.

dxy market

We are going bananas not because Trump is/was just another politician when it comes to the modern American tradition of debt-leveraged inflation to disenfranchise the middle and poor and enrich the already spectacularly wealthy. We are going bananas because Continue reading "United States Still Going Bananas"