Monthly Archives: August 2011

PRIMED FOR A TREND REVERSAL

“Liquidity will eventually find its way into undervalued assets” Gary Savage

I think it’s time for liquidity to drain out of gold and flow back into a severely beaten up stock market. Depending on how quickly the market tests the 200 day moving average will likely determine whether or not it can make marginal new highs before resuming the cyclical (and secular) bear trend.

More in the weekend report…

HISTORY IS BEING MADE

We are truly seeing history being made as the stock market moves down into its yearly cycle bottom.

The last time the market was this oversold was after 9/11.


Breadth has moved to levels even more extreme than the crash of 2008.

When this bottoms, and I think it is days, if not hours away, we are going to see a rally unlike anything we have ever seen before. A rally back up to the 200 day moving average is almost a certainty. Plus the degree of stretch we are seeing right now probably even guarantees a move considerably above the 200 day moving average.

It seems like a great many folks have got it into their head that one is only allowed to make money in the precious metals market. Take a look at the long-term chart of gold though.

This has now become the steepest parabolic move of the entire secular bull market. As we found out in May, parabolic moves are prone to crashes. At this point I have no desire to be in the gold market. I could care less whether it goes to $1800, $1900, or $2000. The risk of getting caught in the crash when the parabola collapses has become too great.

I don’t care where I make money. Gold, silver, or stock market, it’s all the same to me. Profits are profits.

At this point I would rather put capital at risk in a severely oversold stock market than a parabolic gold market.

BEANIE, I TOLD YOU SO!

I apologize for the title, but I think we will all agree Beanie deserved that one. Now that I’ve gotten that out of my system, down to business.

I said in the Thursday night premium report that we would see manufactured economic data as this bear market progressed, but I had no idea it would start so quickly. Does anyone really believe we created 117,000 jobs last month and that unemployment decreased? I suppose with the markets in free fall it probably wouldn’t do to publish the true number, which was almost certainly negative. I suppose it was irrelevant though, it took the market less than 5 min. to figure out the numbers were a sham and sell off.

However, I think the decline is probably done at this point. In my last post I took a guess of 1200 to 1225 as a possible bottoming level. It looks like the government’s pathetic attempt at deception drove the market down a little further to 1175. We should now see a violent, and very convincing, bear market rally. 

On average the S&P will rally about 90 to 110 points in the first 8 to 15 days out of an intermediate cycle bottom. And those are the statistics for intermediate bottoms in a bull market. Bear market rallies are much more violent.This one could be exceptionally so as I expect the powers that be will try to manufacture another rally similar to what happened at the end of June. This time though there will be true demand behind the rally. If the Fed turbochargers the move we could see 125 to 150 point rally over the next 2 to 4 weeks.

I’m positive after that kind of rally our friend Beanie will return with more talk of Dow 36,000. However he will be wrong again. We are, and have been, in a secular bear market since March of 2000 and in a cyclical bear market since May. Until stocks reach insane levels of undervaluation they are going to remain in a secular bear market. It’s possible that we may reach that bottom in the fall of 2012. That is when the next four year cycle low is due.

IS THE FED ABOUT TO MAKE THE MISTAKE OF THE DECADE?

Just as I expected, when the market failed to rally on the debt ceiling resolution, panic set in. As I have been telling people the stock market is not dropping because politicians are debating whether or not to spend more money. They have a long record of raising the debt ceiling whenever it threatened to interfere with their spending spree. So the resolution to the debt ceiling was never in question. We knew from day one that Washington would add another trillion or so to the deficit without any real attempt to cut spending. The market has been in trouble since May because it is starting to price in the next recession.

The S&P has now breached the March intermediate cycle low. In a mature bull market that is almost always a signal that a new cyclical bear market has begun.

I’ve been warning investors since late April that this was coming. Many were fooled by the phony manufactured rally at the end of June. I knew at the time that the Fed’s pitiful attempt to manufacture a momentum move as QE2 came to an end would fail.

All that being said, the market is now moving into the timing band for a major intermediate cycle bottom. My best guess is that the reversal today will probably trigger a weak bounce up to the 200 day moving average, followed by one more leg down. That should mark a more lasting bottom and trigger a 6 to 8 week bear market rally. That rally is going to look very convincing and I’ll tell you why in just a second. But just like the rally in June it is going to fail.


Folks, a recession is unavoidable at this point. The piper is going to have to be paid for printing trillions of dollars and bailing out the financial system. Unfortunately there’s no way around that. The question is will Bernanke make the ultimate blunder and initiate QE3? I’ll explain in a second.

Next we need to take a look at the dollar chart. It’s not a pretty picture. With the market in free fall the dollar should be rallying violently. If May marked the three year cycle low like I originally thought then the dollar should be rising rapidly by now.The fact that it’s not is a very ominous sign.

I’m starting to worry that Bernanke is going to initiate QE3 and he’s going to add a currency crisis on top of the economy sliding back into recession.The combination of both of these at the same time will trigger a collapse much worse than what we went through in 2008.

If the market decides that QE3 is in the cards that would be the trigger for our bear market rally. Unfortunately it would also be the trigger for another spike in commodity prices at the very time that the consumer is least able to withstand them.

What Washington and the Fed don’t seem to realize is that the problem isn’t the size of the dose, it’s that we are using the wrong medicine. We’ve already spent trillions to save the economy and it failed. Let’s pray that the powers that be have enough sense to recognize that more trillions are not going to cure the problem, they are going to exacerbate it.

Unfortunately what no one wants to admit is that there is no cure for our problem. We can’t stop it. It can’t be “fixed”. All we can do is make it worse. We desperately need to face reality and initiate the painful policies that are required to halt the car before it drives off the cliff. Failure to do that will mean that the market will force reality upon us as a major global economic collapse.

Before this is all over and done I fully expect the Keynesian economic model will get tossed into the trash heap where it belongs. If it wasn’t for politicians desire to spend more than they can afford Keynesian policies would have been discarded decades ago.

TIME FOR A MUCH DESERVED REST

Let’s face it, gold bulls have had it pretty easy the last 2 1/2 years. During that time QE1 and QE2 drove a gigantic rally out of the 2008 eight year cycle low.

Folks, at some point a move like that has to enter a lengthy consolidation.

With quantitative easing coming to an end (and QE3 not politically feasible at the moment), the economy likely rolling over into recession, and the dollar possibly setting up for a powerful rally out of the three year cycle low, I think the next deflationary period is now upon us.

 
The last two deflationary episodes forced a severe (2008) and a moderate (2010) correction in gold.

I do think demand is strong enough in the gold market that gold should hold most of its gains. However, I suspect it’s going to be a lot harder to make money during the next year and a half as I expect that gold will be locked in a volatile trading range as it consolidates that gargantuan rally.