Too Many Hopeful Bulls In Gold

August futures set up such an appealing buying opportunity for bulls Monday that several subscribers jumped on it when a timely ‘mechanical’ entry strategy was posted in the chat room. Alas, anyone who got long toward the end of the day watched the trade sink precipitously overnight, stopping out the position for a loss of around $600 per contract. As a rule, when a juicy Hidden Pivot trade set-up flops so miserably, it can pay to quickly reverse the position and do the opposite. In this case, however, going short seems no more appealing than going long, since bullion has been treating bears almost as badly as bulls.

Too Much Hopefulness’

My gut feeling is that the seemingly perfect ‘mechanical’ entry failed because there are still too many hopeful bulls out there. It would appear that they view each and every $20 rally as the first stage of a move to $2000, and that’s why gold has acted so leaden.  Disrupting this familiar pattern, and setting the stage for a sustained rally will likely require one last, brutal shakeout. That would logically imply a dive below the key low at 1230.70 recorded almost exactly a year ago.  If and when this happens, tune to the chat room for a possible ‘counterintuitive’ entry plan.

In the meantime, I plan to ratchet up my skepticism and tune out the “Any-day-now!” bullishness of some of my guru colleagues. I’ll let the charts speak for themselves. This might have saved us some pain, since I green-lighted Monday’s trade even though gold had yet to exceed a 1274.40 benchmark flagged in my last update. For now, I will raise the bar to 1286.90. A rally over the next 2-3 days that hits that price would not likely be a fake.

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