Speculators are running scared in the paper precious metals markets. And that’s a good thing. The past few months’ correction has finally led hedge funds and other technical/momentum traders to shed their long positions and load up on short bets. Meanwhile the Commercials, which tend to be right...

The stars — in the form of smart and dumb money futures contract positions — have once again lined up favorably for precious metals. Here are those positions for gold and silver as of Tuesday the 4th. Notice that speculators (the dumb money) got a lot less optimistic — that is, less long and m...

I recently came across a December 1996 San Jose Mercury News article on tech pioneers’ attempts to carry the pre-browser Internet’s bulletin board community vibe over to the new-fangled World Wide Web. In effect, the article is talking about social media a decade before MySpace and Facebook and ...

All of a sudden the Fed got a little tougher. Perhaps the success of the hit movie Wonder Woman has inspired Fed Chairwoman Janet Yellen to discard her prior timidity to show us how much monetary muscle she can flex when the time comes for action. Although the Fed’s decision this week to ...

The global financial system’s ever-increasing leverage pretty much guarantees another crisis in coming years — unless it’s pre-empted by new weapons that can, in theory, shut down entire national banking systems, thus screwing up the best-laid plans of today’s savers and investors. This seri...

The wild card in cryptocurrencies is the role of Big Institutional Money. I’ve taken the liberty of preparing a projection of bitcoin’s price action going forward: You see the primary dynamic is continued skepticism from the mainstream, which owns essentially no cryptocurrency and conve...

EURGBP: A Picture of Elliott Wave Precision The euro’s recent surge to two-month highs against the pound fit its Elliott wave blueprint beautifully Let’s assume financial markets are driven by news events. Negative news items cause prices to fall, while positive items fuel rallies. Eas...

Bitcoin has been rocketing higher lately, as it gains widespread official approval and more people figure out how to use it. As the first of its kind to emerge, bitcoin has become synonymous with “cryptocurrency”. But lately it’s been joined by a lot of others – which together now account f...

Something extraordinarily good for junior precious metals miners just happened. But for some reason it’s being misinterpreted as a bad thing. Here’s the general story: A Small-Cap Gold Mining ETF Streaks Lower As Big Index Change Looms (Investors.com) – Mining stocks blazed a bright trail of ...

In 1980, the US government – along with pretty much all of its peers – began borrowing at an accelerating rate. Note on the following chart how the trend line steepened in the 2000s and then steepened again in this decade, with a sudden and unexpected pop in 2015 and early 2016, even as the curr...

“The problem with police officers and firefighters isn’t a public-sector problem; it isn’t a problem with government; it’s a problem with the entire society. It’s what happened on Wall Street in the run-up to the subprime crisis. It’s a problem of people taking what they can, just becaus...

One of life’s hardest-to-learn but most necessary lessons is that things usually take a lot longer to work out than you’d like them to. That’s where the sayings “Being too early is the same as being wrong” and “The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent” come from....

In June the UK shocked the world – or at least the world’s elites – by voting to pull out of the European Union. Economists predicted disaster, EU leaders threatened pain for British exporters and tourists, and the media settled in to watch the UK shrivel and die. Four months later, the approp...

Cyclical turning points tend to feature large numbers of people doing and saying what in retrospect turn out to be amazingly dumb things. Think GM highlighting its line of Hummers just before an oil price spike bankrupts the company. Or half the world betting that tech stocks with infinite P/E ratio...

In the latest gold and silver commitment of traders (COT) report (click here for an explanation of what this report involves), paper players made big strides in bringing the market back into balance — and setting the stage for an eventual rebound. Speculators – who tend to be emotional and there...

This year’s recovery in precious metals prices – and the sudden spike in gold/silver mining stocks – convinced a lot of people that a new bull market had begun. Last week’s brutal smack-down scared the hell out of many of the same folks. The latest commitment of traders (COT) report implies ...