Tuesday, May 21, 2013

The Weakness of Yesterday's Jump in Gold

$1363.30 last. Here's the intro to our May 15 post:
Gold Down $30.00 as ETF's Could Dump Another 4,000,000 Ounces
 $1394.50 -$30.00.
The next serious support is the $1321.50 print where the mid-April decline stopped. Through that and you're looking at the $1200 range. As the old-timers used to say, this market is broken more than the Ten Commandments....
We don't put much emphasis on "round numbers" and joke about the "psychologically important" $1346.51 number but it is a fact that yesterday's move stopped at $1399.90.

Put simply the decline that preceded yesterday's pop did not test the April low of $1321.50, instead stalling out at $1336.30. At first blush the higher low would appear to be bullish but it's not. For whatever reason moves that start this way tend to fail. What you want is, at minimum, a symmetrical second bottom but even better is a second low that undercuts the first by a percent or two. I don't know why this is so, back in the day some smart technical analysts said it was to wash out any hope among the weaker holders but even in the algo age you get better moves out of the lower-second-low pattern. Why? Beats me. Here's yesterday's gold action:


Compare with the 2011 double bottom in the Dow Jones Industrials:
Chart forDow Jones Industrial Average (^DJI)