This report started out like any other. A geek doing his geek-like thing, managing what has been a thus far successful market phase. But as the report wore on, my views got right-sized in real time. I have not edited (other than grammar and some untoward wording, etc. and the italicized summary inputs) anything, so as to leave the progression of my learning on the fly intact for your review. It is published publicly with slight edits and certain actionable subscriber content redacted.
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While there is much talk of software rotations and Semi/AI mania, the salient point of the report centers on the coming macro pivot back to a sounder situation, which is the major trend. That trend is in gold vs. the world of stocks, paper and digits in general. The back half of the report is where I think it really started to get interesting for its writer.
Summary
A brief summary of the work done in this week’s report and in the updates and reports leading up to this point. Please read the detailed report for the complete picture. There are many granular details that cannot be summarized so briefly.
Last week’s summaries followed by [new comments in italics]
Precious Metals (bull market)
Correction still technically in effect for gold, silver and gold stocks. Silver/Gold ratio got croaked, but it and the miners sit on key support. We’ll know soon: break down here and the play breaks down. Hold and turn up and… something more pleasant. [unchanged from last week]
US Stock Market (bull market)
Broad SPX hit the 7400 target, popped above it, eased to test it and remains bullish. Semi leads Tech and Tech leads broad. It’s classic intact leadership. It also looks like ending-stage euphoria. The stock market is on the anticipated bounce-back in relation to gold on the wider macro. This can play out for months. Later, gold expected to take back the macro. [it is time to strongly consider pulling in the timing of this macro pivot as there are signs of end-stage bubble-making in play]
Global Stocks (bull market)
ACWX/SPY ratio at important support. If USD booms, global should under-perform US. If USD resumes its bear, the opposite. [and none of it means much if the timing on a US and global market correction is drawing near, which appears the case]
L/T US Treasury Bonds (bear market)
Technically, long-term Treasury bonds are biased bearish (yields biased bullish). But a post-war (if the darn thing is actually ending) disinflationary phase could drop yields/boost bonds. Long-term, it’s a bear market, you know. [bonds are bouncing, and if stock markets correct sooner rather than later, we may finally get the anticipated “interim” bond rally within the L/T bear market, ref. daily chart…]
Commodities/Resources (bull market)
With a suspect TSX-V, there is a potential warning in play. But the commodity complex is not uniform in its status. Oil a wildcard, Copper and Nickel bullish, Uranium questionable. [TSX-V actually looks decent, giving the broad sector some time to sort itself out, but watching Gold/Silver ratio]
US Dollar (cyclical bear market, L/T still a technical bull market)
USD hanging tough in its rally. If it rallies from here many areas could experience pain. However, the Gold/Silver ratio is lame at best. So that would-be support for Uncle Buck is not (yet) in play. [but these two are very much on watch now]
US Stock Market
I’d like to be a little less mechanical this week (notwithstanding my robot friend below) and skip the boiler plate stuff of the indexes and indications. We’ve covered it all to this point.
- SPX (7580) hit and exceeded the measured pattern target of 7400.
- It is still being led by Tech (NDX), which is being led by Semi (SOX).
- Internals are in order, including SPX bounce-back vs. gold.
- The leadership of this mess (Semi/AI) is massively overbought, but…
- The market is rotating internally, and one might think approaching an end date, but…
- Our original 2026 plan was for a bull fest into the mid-terms.
- It could end at any time, but as they say “the market can remain irrational”…
- Meanwhile, we are tracking the internal rotations and speaking personally, trading them.
- On that note…
Software Lives!
Because of course it does. Of course the hype of AI’s impending destruction of the software industry was a bearish mini mania. Some great companies got sold down horribly because our friend at left was going to take over everything imminently.
Well no, he’s not. As noted weeks ago my goal was to find stocks that I thought would be AI-resistant or even benefit from the technology. I inserted the picture at left to depict AI, but you can also view it as the machines that follow whatever instructions their algos spit out. Whatever it was, they sold it hard and it has been fun (and occasionally a little frustrating) picking up the pieces.
As to frustration, I picked the wrong one to hold at earnings. Zscaler got croaked (I escaped with a decent overall profit by selling a partial position, pre-earnings, per the in-day notes). I then swore not to hold these stocks into earnings and then what happened? The next day, watch list item SNOW absolutely exploded on earnings.
Undaunted, I continued on with the play (an internal rotation trade). I released [redacted] due to my ‘not before earnings’ instruction, watched it zoom upward on competitor SNOW’s results and then bought it back on the hard downside upon its own results release, and rode it back upward all in one day. I am already looking for an exit.
[chart redacted]
Zscaler set a bad tone for Cloud software/security, then Snowflake whipsawed the software play in the opposite direction. Want to see something dangerous? It could be the upcoming Crowdstrike earnings with the enthusiastic chart doing this. It’s gone well beyond the upside dynamics that compelled me to sell DDOG recently.
CRWD is a great company. But at a price to sales of 35 with 22% TTM growth? I am tempted to add it to my short list (which is only bloated Semi pig [redacted] at the moment, see Shorts segment below).
So I held off from buying the previously mentioned IOT (ref. NFTRH 916). But it spiked within its major downtrend, pre-earnings, so it remains on low priority watch.
Looking at current holdings, NOW has finally got a move on. Pending the market, and the caution I’ll have around Wednesday’s earnings release by Crowdstrike, clear resistance at 140 to 145 (SMA 200 is 141 and declining) looks like a good target. [I would not be buying this move now as it’s more than half way to target]
Old dinosaur [redacted] has refused to get going, although the little pattern might express upward. It’s got to clear 160 and then maybe it can test the SMA 200 (190) and/or fill the gap at 191.
[chart redacted]
Other old dinosaur Microsoft is finally rewarding my patience. I’d like to think it could fill the gap at 476.
BOX looks to the resistance range of the SMA 200 around 28 to 29.
[redacted] was added on Friday after digesting some positive analysis by SeekingAlpha premium analysis (they actually do have real bottom-up fundamental analysts). Anyway, I bottom-fed the tank job and we shall see how it works out. Again, I feels ins me bones that Cloud Security superstar CRWD is going to affect the entire Cloud/SaaS software space this week, one way or the other.
[chart redacted]
Finally, an alert subscriber pinged me about TEAM, which had zoomed upward on earnings and since consolidated. My response to that and other items in his email:
TEAM appears to have a nice looking bottoming potential, [B]. Thanks for bringing it up.
Zscaler is losing share to Crowdstrike.
I sold DDOG too soon, but it was a great profit.
I failed to do anything before it popped because I didn’t get around to looking into it, personally. So I’ve left it alone for now. But for the sake of discussion, it shot upward on big volume, consolidated on lessening volume, and then boom. That’s textbook. Good eye, [B]!
Shorts
INTC is the only pig I am positioned against. It provided a satisfying and all too rare condition on Friday where my short position was nicely positive and my portfolio of long positions was too. Enjoy the moment, Gary. They are rare.
Short positions in individual stocks are in my small (but growing) trading account. As noted previously, I have only been taking infrequent pot shots at trades that I have high conviction on.
One short of INTC was successfully covered previously. But now with Friday’s crack in INTC, against a positive overall market, and considering that disgusting RSI, I am having greedy feelings about holding for a gap fill all the way down at 68. Easy now, a day at a time in this trading account. But maybe?
Aside from the above-noted CRWD, another pig for shorting consideration could be MU. You can watch and hopefully dismiss this clown telling you to simply buy whatever Trump mentions and make big money. But the salient moment is when Trump pumped Micron it exploded, and armies of retail shut-ins watching dumb videos got aboard. Yeah, that’s gonna end well.
“And now Micron shows that you pretty much don’t need any strategy at all but following exactly what the orange man says to buy.”
That sounds apocalyptic. I would not be the least bit surprised if that video reaps him serious income simply for putting out incredible garbage. But it’s a sign of the [potential end] times.
This is just an example. Trump-mania could be setting us up for epic gains from the short side. But it’s the old “market irrational longer than you can stay solvent” thing that must be dealt with. That risk must be accepted if you’re going to short.
This very discussion has me realizing why they call shorting “the dark side”.
AI-centric Semi ALAB has a nose-bleed P/S of 58 TTM, but growth of 104% TTM. As you know, I hold it long and have done so for much of the last year. I am not considering shorting it, but I will have to consider selling it at some point, if the view of an unsustainable pump job in Semi is an accurate one. For now, shorts like INTC and any others that may be added can be considered offsetting indirect hedges to stocks like this that I hold.
Another theme currently in play is rockets. My nickname for ALAB above is Sky Lab. Well, in checks Rocket Lab, taking its place in the Hype-Olympics with a Space-X IPO on the horizon. I am probably going to avoid it, but if anything goes wrong (including delays) with RKLB’s upcoming Neutron rocket launch its valuation could drop it like space junk breaking through the earth’s atmosphere.
The market cheered like hell when the unprofitable rocket maker (and provider of other launch and spacecraft systems) with a price to sales of 110 TTM at a growth rate of 46% TTM, increased sales by 5.6%. But I think the play is binary. Either the launch goes swimmingly or it does not. If the “does not” option holds sway, I think there is a lot of excess built into this stock.
That’s a long way of saying I’m probably going to avoid it, but it’s been so long since I expended more than a few words on shorting the market or individual stocks. It is coming time to increase such talk.
Circling back to software, the king of them all, Palantir and CEO Karp may be getting the news that their massively disruptive business of replacing and monitoring humans with machines may be busting bullish again. But… software. But… it went up with the post-Snowflake earnings burst. But the massively overbought Crowdstrike reports this week.
PLTR is a question of the 200 day moving average (orange). Take that out and make a higher high to the 3/21 high of 162.40 and off he goes. Don’t take it out and remain vulnerable to a TTM P/S of 71 and ‘only’ TTM growth of 68%. If/when the stock market starts to punish rich valuations again, PLTR and many others will get shot out of the air like clay pigeons (or crashing rockets).
While our main theme for the broad stock market has been a bullish 2nd half of 2026, the rally got started sooner than anticipated. Considering all the hype in play in various market segments, I want to be open to the rally – and possibly the bull market – ending sooner than expected (which was ‘to and through the mid-term elections into year-end’).
Precious Metals & Commodities – A Potential Macro Pivot Upcoming
…away from bubbles and back to real things.
Okay, now it gets interesting. Are we at or nearing peak Trump? He has sunk Massie, Cassidy, Cornyn and others. Politicians with some level of conviction in their beliefs. We can’t have that, now can we? It’s Trump World and all you have to do is listen to whatever stocks he touts and buy them, after all (ref. the goofy video in the Micron segment above).
We are in end times. No, I don’t mean Armageddon. But I do mean Peak Stoopid where society and the stock market are concerned. Those who don’t like me writing like that can tune me out or call me Trump-deranged. It’s fine. This is only about Trump insofar as the public is falling for this “play”. It’s not fun (speaking personally) living in a country getting dumber and more dangerous. But I will try to take advantage of it. That is NFTRH’s job, after all. Not to rail against politics and society.
Except where mass psychology may influence markets. I think we are nearing a pivot point in that regard.
Let’s follow a thread that seems to be forming right here in this very report, the 917th of its (hopefully continuously improving) kind. As we see bubble dynamics forming in the work above (and for several weeks to this point), we see the asset of stability and value continuing to get drubbed in SPX (SPY) terms. GLD/SPY has lost the 200 day moving average, but our key parameter is to make a higher low at or above the shaded box.
Flipping it over and dialing out long-term, we find the bounce in stocks vs. gold very much on plan and acting as expected. As noted previously, this could persist all year, as planned. But as noted in this report, the show could stop sooner, or possibly very soon. Peak Bubble? Peak Stupidity?
Peak or not, we are in a happy relief phase of a new era that will not feel good to the bubble believers in the coming years. Consider this false dawn a kiss goodbye for happy, risk-on casino players.
One more lens through which to view a coming macro pivot would be that of the Gold/RINF (inflation expectations) ratio, which worked so well for years as we made sure the ratio and the miners were in good alignment (if inflation gets out of control in gold terms the miners are in trouble).
As you can see, Gold/RINF (blue) is clinging to an important point that should not break down or else HUI is flying around too high and indicated vulnerable. It’s on a bounce now, but we are talking ongoing correction, which is not indicated to be over. If Gold/RINF holds 233 we can begin be constructive on a coming end to the gold stock correction.
Not There Quite Yet, But…
Think about who is watching and acting upon videos like the one linked above, regarding Micron. That is going to be opportunity, if we can dial in the timing.
But the opportunity will not only be in shorting bubbles. During this time gold is rightly getting the breather it needed from the 2025 upside. In a time of excess and mania in markets, gold will always under-perform. But maybe it is time to think about slingshots.
A slingshot is being pulled back right now. The tension in increasing. What happens when it is released? In my opinion, we are going to see the SPX/Gold chart above drop again and regardless of whether or not SPX crashes or more likely, just hangs around, it will once again greatly under-perform gold. So another perhaps safer (than shorting) opportunity will swing back to gold, gold stocks and silver.
Moving on…
Gold (daily chart) made a kiss of the rising 200 day average. That would be a classic point for the correction to end. The first step to confirming that would be a takeout of the 50 day average (4629 and easing). The final step would be the April 17th high we’ve been discussing, at 4891.
Silver took out its 50 day average and the April 17th high and then summarily failed in fine fashion (a lesson in technical confirmations and grains of salt). Back to the drawing board. Today, silver clings to support after breaking down and putting in a Hammer (candle) on Thursday.
It is not (yet) any sort of compelling technical picture, although risk/reward in silver is obviously light years better than it was in January.
The Silver/Gold ratio (SGR) is not broken, but remains at our #3 level per the options presented in the May 14th NFTRH+ update.
It remains less comfortable and it remains alive. Meanwhile, the proximity above the 50 day average means the bulls have the ball. Tentatively so.
The same can be said for gold stocks and the stocks in sectors that would benefit from a positive Silver/Gold ratio (various commodity sectors). I am willing to give the whole play some leeway. But as soon as I may see the SGR break down and the Gold/Silver ratio (GSR) and US dollar break up that view will change for a while.
GDX held serve at the 200 day average, but like the metal they dig out of the ground, the miners need to take out the 50 day average. At the moment I am focusing on little more than a potential fill of the gap at 95.91.
A Word on Commodities
Last week in NFTRH 916 we reviewed charts of several commodity markets and associated stock charts. There is not much material change from #916. But the main point I want to continue to hammer on is the Silver/Gold ratio and its would-be positive tailwind for the whole host of ’em. Uranium, REE, Battery materials like Ni & Li, PGMs and of course, Copper.
I have exposure to the these. If the SGR breaks upward again I will likely increase exposure. If it breaks down, I’ll reduce. As usual, the GSR/USD combo will tell much of the story in precious metals and commodities. Both the Gold/Silver ratio and the US dollar are more or less going sideways during the manic market frenzy in traditional stocks (US and global).
The 2 Horsemen
The GSR and USD are our long-running combo indicators for market liquidity stress and counter-cyclical signaling. The 2 Horsemen of the macro Apocalypse (or at least interim liquidity problem). Rallies in these two would likely break the precious metals rally (within a correction, itself within a long-term bull market), send the commodity complex bearish (within what I believe is a long-term bull market) and given the bubble nature of the rotating stock market, hammer it as well, ending the mania.
US Market Sentiment
The Fear/Greed index currently flashes “Greed”, but not extreme greed. As usual, there are unnecessary and misinterpreted inputs I find within the group of indicators that make up the index. For example, stock prices at all-time highs flash “Extreme Greed”. No shit, Sherlock. Instead of putting much stock in the index itself, we will review the components that matter.
52 week highs and breadth are negative divergences to the bubble mania going on. While Put/Call ratios are living up to their labels in “extreme greed” territory and the VIX should be labeled “extreme greed” rather than neutral.
For a view of the still very greedy situation in junk bond spreads, let’s again refer to the St. Louis Fed. High Yield spreads are indicated to be very risk-on and quite manic when declining. As you can see, the spread is declining toward the levels that preceded both the 2025 and 2026 market corrections.
NAAIM (investment managers) were taking the cheese again at 98% bullish on May 27, even before the market ended the week higher still.
NAAIM are in dangerous contrarian sentiment territory, at levels reached prior to the 2025 and 2026 corrections.
From their vantage point on the front porch, Ma & Pa (AAII) may have already had enough, registering a potential over-bullish peak on May 13th.
Not being compelled to be right with the market as consistently as NAAIM (managing other peoples’ money), individuals are more inconsistent as a contrary indicator.
Also, there is this mindset in play for regular folk, per AAII’s question to its members.
Based on the sum of the above, market sentiment is extremely over-bullish, on the way to dangerously so.
Bottom Line of NFTRH 917
I have seen enough. This was one of those reports that educated its writer on the fly. There could be a significant +/- on timing, but I feel completely educated on the current market conditions. It’s becoming over-bullish to manic degree, and cause to revise the favored outcome of a broad bull run to and through the mid-term elections.
The war and its noise may intervene as it has been doing all along. But near-term ups and downs aside, I think the odds have shifted to pulling in the timing of a correction from late 2026/early 2027 to something significantly sooner.
Oddly enough, one sector I’ve been poking as a contrary bull play for weeks now, the software sector, is where I am getting some of those indications. Many of them are starting to go off like bottle rockets in “me too!” fashion. That is a sign of a late stage market rally trying to rotate itself out of trouble. If it truly is late stage, that will be temporary as the machines eventually run out of viable options.
Another indication comes from the Semiconductor sector, as so many plays have now gone vertical with AI hype as the driver. It’s important to realize that the source advising this at this very moment is a source who has been long several of these stocks. Not a perma-grouse who missed out. Credibility matters, always.
Speaking personally, I am going to review everything this week with a bias toward taking more profits. I may also increase short positioning. On the positive side, precious metals and commodities are not at all manic. They’ve already long-since worked that condition off.
Indeed, we are now on watch for the wider macro to pivot back to its dominant trend per a bearish big picture SPX/Gold ratio. In the interim, the precious metals would likely take a hit of some kind if/when the broad markets get hit.
More to come, folks. We’ll have updates and future reports to fine tune or even refute the current outlook, if needed. But it seems clear to me that, speaking personally as but one lowly casino patron, the bullish gains have come too easily and it is time to raise a caution flag on US and global stocks.
Portfolios
[segment redacted]
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