Nightmare Scenario: Topping Phase Could Trigger 50% Crash | Chris Vermeulen
Summary
Market Outlook: Chris Vermeulen discusses the possibility of a stage three topping phase in the market, potentially leading to a significant sell-off and a financial reset with a 50% crash in some indices.
Cryptocurrency Insights: Bitcoin is struggling and losing dominance as investors shift focus to Ethereum and other altcoins, indicating a potential alt season.
Stock Market Dynamics: The NASDAQ and S&P 500 are not near all-time highs, with money moving into a broader market, signaling a potential shift in investment focus.
Investment Strategy: Chris emphasizes the importance of having an exit plan and being prepared for market downturns, advocating for a cautious approach focused on risk management and technical analysis.
Commodities: Gold is seen as a strong long-term asset, with potential for a breakout, while silver could experience a significant move to $50 an ounce.
Economic Indicators: The labor market is shifting from job hopping to job hugging, and potential Fed rate cuts could impact market dynamics, with bad economic news possibly being good for markets.
Retirement Planning: Chris advises starting retirement planning early, focusing on diversified investments like real estate and insurance policies to build long-term wealth.
Transcript
To me, this is that stage three massive topping phase where we could go into a a bigger sell-off uh and uh and go into a stage four, a financial reset that could be a 50 plus% crash in some of these indices. Are you a perma bear, Chris? Yeah. Well, I you know what? I guess I'm I'm guilty for it. In fact, I I've written a few uh very interesting articles here. And this one over here, I think people need to read if you think I'm a perma bear. Uh, and I drive you nuts with my bearish topping claims. Yet, I'm always long the markets, which I know gets under people's skin. Stock markets are somewhat calm after last week's Jackson whole meeting. We'll be dissecting what's going on in the markets and what's next with Christopher Mulan, chief market strategist at the technical traders.com. Welcome back, Chris. Hope you've had a good weekend. Like I mentioned in the beginning, stocks are somewhat flat this morning. The S&P is uh flat. The NASDAQ is flat. Uh gold's uh down slightly at uh uh $3,400 an ounce. Bitcoin is the biggest mover on my screen right now, down 2.4%. We'll talk about that. Uh the dollar's holding steady uh and Treasury yields are holding steady as well, up 0.45% on the 30-year. Uh crude oil is spiking 1%. We can talk about that. Big moves in crude oil. So, welcome back to the show, Chris. Good to see you. Hey, thanks for having me, David. Always a pleasure. Yeah, let's start with the biggest movers, though. Uh Bitcoin. So, it's interesting because like I said, stocks are kind of flat today and Bitcoin is just taking a huge beating. I mean, it's not huge for Bitcoin. You know, we've seen 10 20% moves um in a matter of days before. So, 2.4% is really just a run-of-the-mill Monday for for Bitcoin, but it is remarkable and notable given that stocks are flat and Bitcoin typically has followed stocks. So, I'll let you comment on that. Sure. Well, if if we take if we take a look at the chart of Bitcoin, uh obviously it is it's not pushing near all-time highs. It's lost its shimmer. Uh we recently had a play. We actually got out of Bitcoin. Uh locked in some profits right near the peak when it hit a first target. And uh it's just not it's not finding the love. I think all the love is going to Ethereum where I think there's some lots of big big wigs in the um I think the uh crypto space have kind of shifted their focus over to Ethereum. And so I think it's really pulled people over. But uh Bitcoin really struggling. It was looking primed and ready for a big move. it really hit this first little level of resistance and it's just been rejected. So, I mean, at this point, you know, Bitcoin's lost that that mediadriven move. It's always had that for forever, it seems. And uh the fact that it's going the opposite way to me is a warning sign that maybe this shining star in a lot of people's eyes is isn't actually going to perform as they want. And um people are rotating to a different uh different uh crypto at this point. So, you think that maybe right now is a time that uh the alt season is starting to kick in where we have Bitcoin dominance falling? Um, actually, if you'll take a look at the Bitcoin dominance chart, if you allow me to show my screen for just a second here, uh, this shows the Bitcoin market cap as a percentage of total of the total crypto market cap, and that's been declining ever since late June, peaked at 66%, and now it's down to 58%. So, it really looks like, like you said, uh, some of the other cryptos are taking the spotlight here. Yeah. And and what's interesting too is that the the NASDAQ when we look at the NASDAQ uh because Bitcoin has followed the NASDAQ quite a bit. Well, the the Magnificent 7 and the NASDAQ pulled back quite a bit going into the Jackson Hole meeting. People were getting nervous, lightening their load, and the NASDAQ isn't near any isn't near all-time highs. In fact, we're seeing the S&P 500. We're seeing midcaps, small caps, micro caps, uh dividend stocks all popping and moving higher. And so people aren't interested in Bitcoin and the the Magnificent 7 after really in the past couple of weeks to be honest. Uh and we're seeing money move into the broad market and that is a good sign for the stock market. We want to see a broad market rally. We don't want to just see one pocket of stocks, a handful of stocks drive things up. We want to see people moving in all over the place. So I think maybe people got their fix of of the Magnificent 7 temporarily and and maybe of Bitcoin and and they're starting to look elsewhere. Uh so that's kind of a we're in this kind of shift and you and I talked two weeks ago. You said this is a really critical turning point. The market I think is changing its dynamic and the big question here is is the market going to consolidate pause here and then break higher and run up or is it going to stall out and then reverse and sell off and kind of do what we saw back in in 2024. And I shared this chart with you uh and everyone last year or sorry last time you and I spoke a couple weeks ago saying hey we're in this this turning phase potential turning phase. The big question is do we do what happened last year and test the April lows or are we going to you know break out and go higher? At this point the market is still looking like it wants to go higher and we're seeing broad market strength which is a good sign of that. Okay. Do you think Bitcoin can serve as a leading indicator from this point on for the broad markets? No, I've never I've never used it as a leading indicator, you know. No, I No, I don't. Okay. No, just no. Well, let's take a look at the breath of the stock market now. Um, not much activity today. Uh, but if we take a look at some multi-day or multi-week trends, uh, I wonder if it's forming a topping pattern. Let's see. Yeah, I mean, if we look at the the daily chart, I mean, it's in a strong uptrend. It's it's kind of just trying to figure out like the S&P 500 here trying to figure out if it's going to break higher. If we look at the weekly chart, take a a bigger look. Uh you can see here it's it's in a nice strong uptrend as well. I mean, it's it just had a pause about a month ago, a pullback, and it's recovered. So, it still has a very strong chart even on the on the weekly. And if we go to the monthly chart, you can see here, I mean, it's still a green bar. It's it's above this five period moving average, this light blue line. And when you can hold above this light blue line, you're in a very strong phase. Uh it's a high momentum move. So we're still in this high momentum move and it really we got to wait for this to run out of steam. And um you know, we're from an economic standpoint, I do think the markets are getting a little they continue to kind of weaken. We've seen, you know, people going from job hopping like they get a job and if they don't like it, they just jump to the next one. And people couldn't, you know, businesses, entrepreneurs couldn't find quality staff. And now it's gone from job hopping to job hugging is like the new term I just learned about. Uh people just don't want to let go of their jobs. They're worried. I know a lot of people who can't get a job right now. They just got out of university last year and they can't even get a job at like a fast food place. Like it's crazy how the dynamics have changed and all this stuff changes slowly behind the scenes before it catches up to the stock market. I think in a lot of cases um and the market is still moving higher with the Magnificent 7. really still is. It's doing a lot of the heavy lifting. Just the last day from Jackson Hole was a broad market pop and we need to see if it's more than just a one-day thing or if this is a a new trend of money flowing into the broad market. So, I'm I'm all of the charts for the stock market are still pointing up. When we look at our investment, our investing trend, uh we can identify when the market is, you know, in a bullish environment. 2022 is a bearish environment. Um, we just had a nice bullish environment and the market had a reset this year from the from the tariff and now we're back into a bullish environment. So, you don't want to fight the trend. I know the big problem here is a lot of people have FOMO. They they missed out on the rally. They didn't take part of it. They're too scared. They feel like the market is going to fall and collapse, which I I think it will at any point, but you can't let the fear and the emotions get in front of your trades. you have to still take those positions and and go with the trend because the market will will continue longer than you know than you're going to want it to go and it'll apply maximum pain until it sucks you in. And I do think we're starting to see this market um suck in a lot of investors, but we're not quite at a a top yet, but I do think it's coming and I think it'll happen this year. They just we have to let that unfold. And from multi multiple um chart time frames, as you said, David, um you know, from my perspective, everything's still bullish here. Before we continue, I want to thank Private Internet Access for sponsoring this video. Using the internet without protection is like mailing a letter without an envelope. anyone can see what you're sending. A VPN solves that problem. 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Could it be uh Chris that if the labor market weakens we could have the Fed lower rates maybe faster than expected? Certainly I I would be betting on more uh Fed easing which may be good for markets. So uh we may be in a period where bad news at least for the broad economy may be good news for the markets. uh POW said last week, risks to inflation are tilted to the upside and risks to employment are to the downside. A challenging situation. So something similar to what you mentioned, the Fed will proceed carefully. Um but he said the shifting balance of risks may warrant adjusting our policy stance. So markets are now pricing in a likely chance of a cut by September. Yeah. So I wonder how Yeah. Yeah. Go ahead. Yeah. I mean, they just they just tweak the odd word here and there and throw in a new little phrase. is I mean I think people read into it way too much. They're always balancing on, you know, they're always saying they're going to make adjustments if it needed. Who cares how they say it? It's the same thing. Uh I I just don't read into the those statements and all that stuff too deeply because they're always weighing everything and they're going to make a change. Um that's why you really just need to follow price, follow the money flow because you don't know what they're going to do, when they're going to do it. And uh it really is, you know, just, you know, their words are like a spell and they suck people in and they just kind of control their they have it nailed down. They know exactly how to say to not quite give enough, but there's no direction and you just always uncertain. So people need to not read into that too much and and actually follow the price charts from multiple time frames as you just said and that'll keep you on the right side of the market. Are you still of the view that markets have entered a phase three per your multi-phase uh outlook and it's uh passed or just at the tipping point of the euphoria phase? Yeah. So if we do take a look at that, this is the stage three chart that you're you're you're talking about and I've talked about how I believe we're in this stage three topping phase for a long time now. There's this the the thing with this where we are in the market environment is we have Magnificent 7 doing a lot of the heavy lifting pulling the NASDAQ and the S&P 500 to new all-time highs not representing this kind of topping phase in most stocks. And if we go back and we look at this particular blend of ETFs now this is the RSP IWM and IWC. This is the more or less broad market. It's equal weighted S&P 500. It's small caps and it's micro caps. If we just zoom out, I mean, in the grand scheme of things, we'll just go way back here. The the stock market isn't breaking new all-time highs. We potentially have a major double top or or triple top, however you want to look at it. We haven't really fully broken out with all stocks to new highs. We're pretty darn close, but we're not there yet. And this is usually, you know, every time we've seen the stock market, the overall stock market get to this level, we have seen a 20 plus% crash in correction. So, we need to be very aware that we're at this tipping point where the market could roll over. I I shared that chart of 2024, how it shows this is kind of right when it went into a nose dive last year and sold off. If we take a look at the seasonality chart of the S&P 500, usually at right at the end of August, the market starts to sell off into October. So, there's a lot of lot of headwinds about to run into this market. And while the trend is still up, you you need to know it might come to an end soon. Um, if you're in positions, you might have to exit them soon. Uh, take a potential loss or start locking in gains. U but overall, the broad market to me is uh in a stage three topping phase. To me, this is that stage three massive topping phase where we could go into a bigger sell-off uh and uh and go into a stage four, a financial reset that could be a 50 plus% crash in some of these indices, which kind of leads over to another chart I'm not sure you and I have ever really shared shared before. If we come down here to the economic and business cycle, now I usually show the stock market cycles, but this one focuses on this yellow cycle, which is the the business the economic cycle. And what's interesting, the cycle in the background, the blue one is the stock market. We're right here near this major top in the stock market. This is where innovation and adaptiveness, adaptation, eagerness really comes into play. And because the innovation right now, it happens to be in tech in large tech that drag the indices up. It's camouflaged this stage three topping phase. So yes, the indices are going up, but it is still really a handful of stocks doing most of it. And that's because we have AI. That's because everybody's adapting and bringing it in, and it's spurring all kinds of work and innovation and costs and sales, and it's keeping the I think the the economy really purring here and holding its ground. But once this phase fizzles out and people realize, okay, well, yeah, AI is great, but it still has a lot to come, you know, to unfold before it really becomes really useful, then I think the markets will roll over. So, we're in this this phase where people feel the innovation and they're applying it. Uh, and it's just another one of those signals that we're got to be aware that, you know, usually when the music's good and everybody's having a good time and you're at the top, there's usually only one place to go, which is down from there. And so we're in this I believe we're slowly maturing through this stage three topping phase through this economic cycle and we're already seeing it with chat GPT. I mean Sam Alman you know really threw a curveball with anybody using chat GPT. He forced ChatGpt 5 on everybody. It's not the best. It has all kinds of issues. Everybody complained right away and within a day they brought chat GPT 4.0 back. They're cutting costs supposedly that new system. Long story short, AI is realizing they need to stop bleeding money and they need to start focusing on efficiency and slow down a bit. Uh so that's where I believe we are in this kind of economic and this business cycle. And once it does start to slow down, we might actually see the economy slow down, jobs potentially start to jobless claims start to go up. I think it's because you've been saying that we've been at a topping phase, phase three, topping phase for quite some time that people have been calling you a perma bear, at least on my channel. Can you address that? Are you a perma bear, Chris? Yeah. Well, I you know what? I guess I'm I'm guilty for it. In fact, I I've written a few uh very interesting articles here. And this one over here, I think people need to read. If you think I'm a perma bear, uh and I drive you nuts with my bearish topping claims, yet I'm always long the markets, which I know gets under people's skin. Uh they need to obviously follow me to to get the full gist of it. But there's I wrote this article about me walking in as a perma bear into a bull market and how I'm guilty for it. But what it really means is it's actually one of the best compliments I could get. But people just see it the wrong way and they don't understand how I go about taking how I go about managing that. And the all these articles here are very very educational. Uh and they help you see how the markets function and they they carry over into position management, risk management, and being a bear. You know, people who are a perma bull. You've got like I just wrote an article about Kathy Woods to Tom Lee. Kathy Woods was the hero. She was the permabil had everybody into the markets uh until until that strategy didn't work and there was no exit plan. Everybody holding the ARC ETFs lost 75 plus%. Tom Lee is the new superhero. He's everywhere. He's super bullish. Always has good for upper forecasts. And this article talks about how that journey starts and ends with all of these different people that come through as mainstream media. And uh so anyways, if people want to hear about my perma my perma bear view and what it actually means, it means I'm always looking out for our portfolio. I'm always focused on protection versus being totally blind to protection and just saying, "Oh, it's going higher. Bye bye bye." Uh which is what everyone else does until the music stops. And then their strategy, most people realize it wasn't a strategy. It was them getting sucked into the markets, getting money under management. That's what these big institutions on Wall Street do. and moving people into their products. But uh yeah, so anyways, that's kind of my my take on on that. But how can you be bearish in the medium term and still be long? Let's just clarify that. Are you long right now? Because last time we talked a couple weeks ago, you were all in cash. We have. Yeah, we Yeah. As if people go back and check the chart, you can see the trend had gone uh neutral. We moved to cash. Uh we moved back into the market. We actually took a Bitcoin trade with one of our strategies. We hit our target, moved out of it. We already locked in gains in our silver miner SILJ trade. We locked in gains on our our um uh communications ETF trade and we're long the indices here. Uh we do we move in and out. And just because I think the sky is falling and I say listen that things are going to get ugly at some point doesn't mean that's where I trade. I just I'm just saying have an exit plan because when it does happen it's going to happen fast and every pause and pullback in the market could be the start of it. No one knows where the markets are going. All we can do is say, "Okay, well, here's the I always just say, "Well, here's the worst case scenario. Let's just be protected for it. And if the market keeps going up, we'll just ride it higher." I hate I I I hate giving out high upward targets. It just sucks people in. Um that's I mean I I just see things differently. I'm very riskoriented. I've been through a bankruptcy. I've blown up multiple trading accounts about 15 20 years ago. I've gone through all that. And I I know sucking investors in with bullish claims is what everyone else does. And what I want to focus on is like let's just know there's going to be a storm coming and it's either you're going to lose your shirt and downgrade your lifestyle and retirement, not be able to retire potentially. Let's just have a game plan and let's always know that storm is brewing and it's you never know when that front is going to hit. And until then, we'll just continue to ride the markets up using technical analysis, risk and position management. And when the storm hits, eventually one of those pullbacks will be the one where we go, "Wow, we totally dodged that bullet, and we just happen to be continuing to grow our money in a different asset class as the stock market falls." So, people always want a a fixed set. They want to know where something's going from here to there. They want to know the numbers. They want exact stuff. The markets don't work that way. Everybody who does that, it's it it's just not true because nobody knows for sure. We can say, "I think it's going here. This is where price should go." I mean, I always talk like a lawyer. Everything is should, could, would hopefully because that's the reality of it. But everybody sticks to anyone in the media who gives like really crisp clear values. This is going to hear, right? Like in the next week or people want that, but it's actually the wrong way to look at the markets and you're going to get you're going to get stuck in some really bad positions and uh people like certainty, but there is no certainty in the markets. And I was on a talk the other day and somebody said, "Chris, you are certain about this move." move and I'm like, I'm not certain about anything. All I'm certain about is we need to protect our money and follow the trends. Like that is the reality of it. But people don't want that, right? They want to say, tell me what to buy. Tell me where it's going. And and they expect it to work. And if it doesn't, they just get angry. But um I I just focus on people who are want to be protective of their capital, of their life savings, and uh their retirement. And I don't, you know, I'm not I'm not shooting out high numbers and trying to suck people into trades. I'm trying to protect people and move them in and out of the market comfortably, casually, uh, to pull money out consistently and compound our money. You know, we don't have a lot of big gains every year, like big trades or we have huge gains, but that's because we take smaller positions that have are we we have a lot of smaller trades, David, that make, you know, one, two, 3% on our portfolio each time. We have 5 to 12 of these every year, but we compound our growth on every trade. So instead of having a huge winner, we have like five or 12 smaller trades that compound on top of each other. And Albert Einstein says one of the most powerful uh uh forces in the universe is compound interest. And that's what we do. We take a handful of small safe trades with our entire portfolio and we just compound it over and over again throughout the year. And we don't care where the market goes. We don't try and pick a top or bottom. we just are happy with chipping away and we end up making higher growth returns than most other strategies anyway because of this because of the compounding and because of our high win rate. You said that people should be aware of this coming brewing storm and you've learned this lesson before yourself which is why you're always constantly aware of this in the background. Well, tell us about some of the mistakes that you've made that have made you hypervigilant. What happened? Yeah. So, uh I mean I think one of the one of the big ones was even when I was a kid, it wasn't even my mistake. It was my parents um got involved with a bad investment and we were living pretty high on the hog and my dad was retired and got involved in something and didn't realize it was a scam or shy who ended up taking all him and his investors capital and we went bankrupt. We went from the top of the food chain to the bottom and um that was a real wakeup call and and after that I had also started trading in the stock market. I learned to trade, buy stocks, sell covered calls. Uh I was kind of only buying stocks that had growth quarter after quarter. I was buying the strongest stocks in the stock market. I took many courses and seminars on how to do this. It was all fundamental pretty much. And then the tech bubble came and even the strongest companies in the world with the best growth uh their stair prices got cut in half and then they got cut in half again. And I I literally blew up my account and I realized that fundamental and news doesn't do anything. You really need to invest in something going up in price or don't own it. And so that's when I flipped to technical analysis. John Murphy, he's known as like the godfather of technical analysis. Big thick book I've read many times. Um learn chart patterns, learn intermarket analysis. That's where I actually shine. I take about 12 different asset classes. We track them all. We have different ratios and we get an idea of what the sentiment is doing. And and I follow not only the price trends, but we want to make sure there's enough sentiment behind it to push that wave. And you and I have talked about this in the past. The stock market to me is like the ocean. When the tide goes up, what happens to all boats? Well, when the stock market goes up, what happens to most stocks? They go up. But when we're in a bearish environment and the tide is going down, you don't want to hold stocks. I don't care what sector it is. If you look at pretty much every sector in the stock market during a bare market, they go down. So, I move away from assets. I move away from equities in total. Uh, when we're in a downtrend, period, whether it's a two-e downtrend or a multi-year bare market, we don't know what it's going to be, so we move aside. And I've blown up multiple accounts doing this. I used to day trade futures. I blew up a futures account in one trading day. That was the last account I blew up. I funded it. It was a revenge day. Hey, I was trying to make back the account I blew up like a month earlier. And um so I have I have lost my money slowly over time from fundamentals and wasted years. And then I have also blow up my blown up my money being an aggressive trader in one day. And I've done that a couple of times. Um so that's those are all my war wounds and I've been through it and now it's like how can I just grow my entire portfolio and not have to worry about the news or tariffs or the Fed or economic data and just just follow price. it it you know we have a lot of subscribers that follow my stuff and they there's one common theme a couple they're like I wish I found you decades ago I sleep better at night I don't get as much FOMO and and fear anymore because I touch on these like every day in our morning video I said you might be feeling fear because we have indicators that will tell us when the mass market is fearful they're panicking or when they feel like they're missing out on a trend so I'm kind of just that voice of reason I've been told I'm the David Atenboroough of the stock market Uh, so like you know I just have very different view and different angle. I'm not out swinging for the fences. I'm just like how can savvy investors grow our money in a very comfortable way and never have to worry about risking our shirts and uh and lifestyle. Okay. Well, Chris, the uh other way to look at it is okay, you've got your strategy which keeps people safe, sleeping at night, no nightmares. I could just also sleep at night with no nightmares and no fears and no uh worries to think about if I just put my money away in the S&P 500 and go away in 20 and 30 years and my retirement will be fine because historically that's worked out well for people who have done that and and 100%. And a kid could do that. I'm not helping kids. I'm helping people who have money who are close to retirement who are retired who don't have 30 years. Right? So that's that's where I'm focused on. So there's obviously every investor has a totally different need and time horizon. I'm focusing on myself where I'm at and everybody where I'm at and ahead of me um so that we don't have to worry about any of that stuff. But the buy and hold works. You hold for 30 years. You should do exceptionally well. But here's the thing with the buy and hold. You will never retire early. You need that 30 or 40 years because you're going to have decade or two in there of no returns where markets are always just recovering from recent highs, all of that stuff. So again, I'm just I focus on one particular side of investing for a certain age group. Um that's that's my that's my sweet spot. Okay, let's move on to uh oil. I want to show an oil chart here. Sure. Yeah, oil has been sliding down all year and uh just today big rebound. Um actually, if you just zoom in a couple days, it's been kind of on the rebound, but uh I'll let you comment on whether or not this is the start of a trend or um just noise. Yeah, at at this point I think it's noise. I think it's um I actually covered this this morning with subscribers that we're in this short-term downtrend. It's been kind of trading sideways. And what I find gold and oil like to do this a lot. They create this what I call a little hook. So, a lot of people be building a bearish pattern or a position expecting this to go lower. But what happens is you have a little bit of a hook up. Price starts to break some of these recent highs. The shorts start to get nervous. They're on the wrong side. uh people also start to get bullish and they buy and it creates a a green bar up and then what it does is it gets the shorts out, spooks them out, gets people long and then of course it sells off afterwards. We saw something like this uh several months ago. We sold off, it started to put in a consolidation and then boom, it has a short squeeze, a little bit of a pop, a hook up, and then it goes back down. And so the markets are really good at doing this. I don't see this being a strong move up at this point. I think it's really just a little bit of a more of a trading play. If we zoom out on the chart and we draw a line across like major major resistance through here, uh price is kind of still stuck under key resistance and you and I touched on this in our last talk. This big spike up here, I think it was news driven. Uh it goes up for a couple days, everybody chases the news, they feel like they're getting left behind, and then it rolls over and takes all their money, who whoever got long chasing it. And so that has to be negated. just forget about that news driven pop. Uh, and oil has fallen right back down into the downtrend under resistance and it might still want to go a bit higher, but I think it's just a bounce within a downtrend. What about the other commodities? Let's take a look at gold. Gold has been just consolidating in a range for months now. What's going on with gold? Yeah, I really like gold. I mean, gold is gold has done many of these where, you know, it it has this big rally up and then it consolidates for months and then has a rally, consolidates for months, has a rally. Uh, gold has been warning us for a long time. It's a top performing asset long-term. It's near all-time highs. It has a very strong bull chart, a bull flag pattern that points to about $4,100 if this move plays out, maybe even a whole lot higher. But gold is warning us that something is wrong. the fact that it keeps uh it's holding its value and going up long term here is the sign that people around the world are nervous and I think you know gold sometimes the market there's a couple sayings sometimes the market will if it can't shake you out it will wait you out and that is what it's doing people are starting I I I'm hearing some technical analysts getting really bearish on gold saying that gold's about to fall it's going to have a big drop which I do think will happen but not until the economy and everything turn over and we potentially go into a stock market, a bare market. I think that'll pull gold down. But, um, it's funny. It's Oh, sorry. A bare market will pull gold down. A bare market in stocks will pull gold down eventually. Uh, just because of the selling pressure, the mass liquidation, and we saw this in 2008, uh, when once the stock market starts to pick up a lot of speed and sells off with huge volume and panic, gold usually gets sold off with it. But before that happens, gold usually shoots up. It'll go higher for a little while, for potentially a month or two as the stock market starts to sell off. So, I'm not really worried about gold. Uh right now though, there's no doubt it's gone sideways so long people are giving up on it. They're starting to go bearish. They're moving into gold miners because they're like, I need to get into something that's moving. This is gold. Gold is boring. And silver is starting to move and break out, right? And so, people are moving away from gold. that's usually a sign that gold's about ready to actually make a move. Um, so I like gold and silver and I I do think they have potential for one to two months upward movement and I think it could be, you know, 20 plus% for both of them, which would put up near $50 an ounce. Uh, wait, sorry. When's that going to happen? This year, next year? I I would think it's going to happen this year. I mean, uh, I don't know for sure, but the chart pattern is based on it should h it should start to happen pretty much any week here. It should start to break out and start to run. I want to talk about silver and finish off on silver in just a minute, but before that, I have two observations on gold. I'd like you to comment on. So, first of all, on the analysis that people have that, you know, this is about to break down to the downside because it's been consolidating for so long. Typically, that's not what happens to gold. If you just take a look at the chart historically and zoom out and take a look at what what has happened in the past, whenever gold has stalled for for months or maybe even years on end, uh typically what happens is um it breaks out to the upside. Uh a few notable exceptions is 2011 and 2011 was an exception because gold has typically only fallen when it's just spiked up and then immediately fallen. So then this isn't really a consolidating pattern because in 2011 it's gone up and then immediately fell. Um and then a multi-year consolidating pattern led to a breakout. As you can see here in 2022, this is what you were talking about. This is the second observation. Um in 2022 when stocks go down, that's when you know there's a lot of selling pressure overall in the markets that could bring to gold down as well. That's what happened to gold in 2022. Went down 20%. Yeah. So I'll let you comment on both of those things. Yeah, I think you're right. I think uh I think right where right right where we are in gold right now where it's been consolidating uh I I think it's very close to popping. In fact, if we were to go right over to 2007, gold went sideways for many many months and then suddenly just before just as the stock market was starting to roll over, gold shot higher and it and it rocketed up about 37% something like that. And so I this this huge pattern is like exactly kind of where we're at right now when we look at gold. It's had this big run up. It's been trading sideways for months. And I think we have one more big push. And I think you're right, David. I think you know it is a pause and consolidation at this point. You have to expect it to go higher. There are to me I don't see anything bearish about this chart pattern. It's um you know it really is pointing to higher pricing. It's kind of it in a nutshell. Okay. Silver. You like silver more. or less than gold right now. Um, silver silver's got some it it has potential to have a decent move. I mean, it could actually pop and rally to if we were to go all the way back. I think it could go spike up to that $50 mark. I think we could potentially see it pick up speed in the next month or two and shoot up and try and hit all-time highs. I think gold will rally at the same time. Miners, silver is is really difficult. You just never know when it's going to have one of these explosive parabolic moves and shoot up. It has has a lot of energy built up. It's a small market. A lot of people are watching it, accumulating it, and when it starts to run, it becomes a very crowded trade very quickly, which is what drives it up. Uh, at this point, I mean, I see it going to about $41 an ounce, but depending on how this unfolds, I think we could see a much a much bigger explosion to the upside. And it might have a blowoff phase where we go right back into this 50 mark. And this will this will probably be exactly what you said, David. When gold and silver have that spike up, that's usually also when they come straight back down. So, I think this will be that blowoff spike move that puts a top in gold and silver temporarily and then we potentially start to see it sell off. Okay, Chris, uh, final question because because we were talking about retirement earlier. When should somebody prep for retirement or start preparing for retirement? Oh, man. I don't know. There's so many different ways to do it. Do you like um the theory I've heard from PE retirement planners is you should start as early as possible. The moment you get your first paycheck after college, that's when you should be thinking about retirement. 100 Yeah, 100%. Most people don't. I I'm a long-term planner. I mean, I have multiple uh whole life insurance policy, un universal life insurance policies I did long time ago that are funded and they really like lotto tickets later in life. I think if people can get into something like that at an early age when premiums are low and you can put money away every year and it ends up giving you this huge tax-free kind of income surge down the road, I think the sooner somebody could do that, even if you're in your 30s, it's not too late. Uh, but time is money for those type of investments. I think people should also look at buying into, you know, buying into real estate. I think buying a duplex, triplex or quad is one of the smartest things you could do at a young age. You can live in one. If the tenant doesn't show up or you miss one for another, it's like the whole mortgage is on you. Eventually, you'll buy another house and you can rent that out and you'll have two, three, or four doors paying you 25, 3,500 bucks a month. You'll have cash for life plus an asset going up. There's so many ways to plan for retirement. Um, young people can get into real estate because it requires tons of leverage. You get a mortgage. Usually, young people don't have big lumps of money to trade with. So, that's why real estate, I think, is a very smart play at a younger age. You get a lot more leverage and borrow a lot more money. And um, but yeah, people should people should look into it right away. I think if they were to speak with the right financial planner at a young age and see the different options, they'll be like there's like five avenues or four avenues you can do and you can do each one a little bit um that aren't life-changing and require a little bit of discipline. People don't like discipline unfortunately and a lot of people don't have any uh which is a lot of times why people are stuck where they are financially. Um success requires discipline. I don't care what kind of success it is, you have to be disciplined in whatever it is. And the more discipline you have, usually the more successful you are across the board. Um, so yeah, the younger the age, there is no too, you're never too young to plan long term and know your options and and drift towards them at least. Uh, have them in the back of your mind. Okay. Thank you very much, Chris. So stay disciplined and follow Chris in the link down below. We'll put the uh link to Chris's work down below so you can learn more about his trading strategies and asset revesting, which is a strategy that he employs. We'll see you next time, Chris. Welcome back to the show. Good to see you as always. Take care. Uh take care for now. Thanks, David. Appreciate it. Take care. Thank you for watching. Don't forget to like and subscribe.
Nightmare Scenario: Topping Phase Could Trigger 50% Crash | Chris Vermeulen
Summary
Transcript
To me, this is that stage three massive topping phase where we could go into a a bigger sell-off uh and uh and go into a stage four, a financial reset that could be a 50 plus% crash in some of these indices. Are you a perma bear, Chris? Yeah. Well, I you know what? I guess I'm I'm guilty for it. In fact, I I've written a few uh very interesting articles here. And this one over here, I think people need to read if you think I'm a perma bear. Uh, and I drive you nuts with my bearish topping claims. Yet, I'm always long the markets, which I know gets under people's skin. Stock markets are somewhat calm after last week's Jackson whole meeting. We'll be dissecting what's going on in the markets and what's next with Christopher Mulan, chief market strategist at the technical traders.com. Welcome back, Chris. Hope you've had a good weekend. Like I mentioned in the beginning, stocks are somewhat flat this morning. The S&P is uh flat. The NASDAQ is flat. Uh gold's uh down slightly at uh uh $3,400 an ounce. Bitcoin is the biggest mover on my screen right now, down 2.4%. We'll talk about that. Uh the dollar's holding steady uh and Treasury yields are holding steady as well, up 0.45% on the 30-year. Uh crude oil is spiking 1%. We can talk about that. Big moves in crude oil. So, welcome back to the show, Chris. Good to see you. Hey, thanks for having me, David. Always a pleasure. Yeah, let's start with the biggest movers, though. Uh Bitcoin. So, it's interesting because like I said, stocks are kind of flat today and Bitcoin is just taking a huge beating. I mean, it's not huge for Bitcoin. You know, we've seen 10 20% moves um in a matter of days before. So, 2.4% is really just a run-of-the-mill Monday for for Bitcoin, but it is remarkable and notable given that stocks are flat and Bitcoin typically has followed stocks. So, I'll let you comment on that. Sure. Well, if if we take if we take a look at the chart of Bitcoin, uh obviously it is it's not pushing near all-time highs. It's lost its shimmer. Uh we recently had a play. We actually got out of Bitcoin. Uh locked in some profits right near the peak when it hit a first target. And uh it's just not it's not finding the love. I think all the love is going to Ethereum where I think there's some lots of big big wigs in the um I think the uh crypto space have kind of shifted their focus over to Ethereum. And so I think it's really pulled people over. But uh Bitcoin really struggling. It was looking primed and ready for a big move. it really hit this first little level of resistance and it's just been rejected. So, I mean, at this point, you know, Bitcoin's lost that that mediadriven move. It's always had that for forever, it seems. And uh the fact that it's going the opposite way to me is a warning sign that maybe this shining star in a lot of people's eyes is isn't actually going to perform as they want. And um people are rotating to a different uh different uh crypto at this point. So, you think that maybe right now is a time that uh the alt season is starting to kick in where we have Bitcoin dominance falling? Um, actually, if you'll take a look at the Bitcoin dominance chart, if you allow me to show my screen for just a second here, uh, this shows the Bitcoin market cap as a percentage of total of the total crypto market cap, and that's been declining ever since late June, peaked at 66%, and now it's down to 58%. So, it really looks like, like you said, uh, some of the other cryptos are taking the spotlight here. Yeah. And and what's interesting too is that the the NASDAQ when we look at the NASDAQ uh because Bitcoin has followed the NASDAQ quite a bit. Well, the the Magnificent 7 and the NASDAQ pulled back quite a bit going into the Jackson Hole meeting. People were getting nervous, lightening their load, and the NASDAQ isn't near any isn't near all-time highs. In fact, we're seeing the S&P 500. We're seeing midcaps, small caps, micro caps, uh dividend stocks all popping and moving higher. And so people aren't interested in Bitcoin and the the Magnificent 7 after really in the past couple of weeks to be honest. Uh and we're seeing money move into the broad market and that is a good sign for the stock market. We want to see a broad market rally. We don't want to just see one pocket of stocks, a handful of stocks drive things up. We want to see people moving in all over the place. So I think maybe people got their fix of of the Magnificent 7 temporarily and and maybe of Bitcoin and and they're starting to look elsewhere. Uh so that's kind of a we're in this kind of shift and you and I talked two weeks ago. You said this is a really critical turning point. The market I think is changing its dynamic and the big question here is is the market going to consolidate pause here and then break higher and run up or is it going to stall out and then reverse and sell off and kind of do what we saw back in in 2024. And I shared this chart with you uh and everyone last year or sorry last time you and I spoke a couple weeks ago saying hey we're in this this turning phase potential turning phase. The big question is do we do what happened last year and test the April lows or are we going to you know break out and go higher? At this point the market is still looking like it wants to go higher and we're seeing broad market strength which is a good sign of that. Okay. Do you think Bitcoin can serve as a leading indicator from this point on for the broad markets? No, I've never I've never used it as a leading indicator, you know. No, I No, I don't. Okay. No, just no. Well, let's take a look at the breath of the stock market now. Um, not much activity today. Uh, but if we take a look at some multi-day or multi-week trends, uh, I wonder if it's forming a topping pattern. Let's see. Yeah, I mean, if we look at the the daily chart, I mean, it's in a strong uptrend. It's it's kind of just trying to figure out like the S&P 500 here trying to figure out if it's going to break higher. If we look at the weekly chart, take a a bigger look. Uh you can see here it's it's in a nice strong uptrend as well. I mean, it's it just had a pause about a month ago, a pullback, and it's recovered. So, it still has a very strong chart even on the on the weekly. And if we go to the monthly chart, you can see here, I mean, it's still a green bar. It's it's above this five period moving average, this light blue line. And when you can hold above this light blue line, you're in a very strong phase. Uh it's a high momentum move. So we're still in this high momentum move and it really we got to wait for this to run out of steam. And um you know, we're from an economic standpoint, I do think the markets are getting a little they continue to kind of weaken. We've seen, you know, people going from job hopping like they get a job and if they don't like it, they just jump to the next one. And people couldn't, you know, businesses, entrepreneurs couldn't find quality staff. And now it's gone from job hopping to job hugging is like the new term I just learned about. Uh people just don't want to let go of their jobs. They're worried. I know a lot of people who can't get a job right now. They just got out of university last year and they can't even get a job at like a fast food place. Like it's crazy how the dynamics have changed and all this stuff changes slowly behind the scenes before it catches up to the stock market. I think in a lot of cases um and the market is still moving higher with the Magnificent 7. really still is. It's doing a lot of the heavy lifting. Just the last day from Jackson Hole was a broad market pop and we need to see if it's more than just a one-day thing or if this is a a new trend of money flowing into the broad market. So, I'm I'm all of the charts for the stock market are still pointing up. When we look at our investment, our investing trend, uh we can identify when the market is, you know, in a bullish environment. 2022 is a bearish environment. Um, we just had a nice bullish environment and the market had a reset this year from the from the tariff and now we're back into a bullish environment. So, you don't want to fight the trend. I know the big problem here is a lot of people have FOMO. They they missed out on the rally. They didn't take part of it. They're too scared. They feel like the market is going to fall and collapse, which I I think it will at any point, but you can't let the fear and the emotions get in front of your trades. you have to still take those positions and and go with the trend because the market will will continue longer than you know than you're going to want it to go and it'll apply maximum pain until it sucks you in. And I do think we're starting to see this market um suck in a lot of investors, but we're not quite at a a top yet, but I do think it's coming and I think it'll happen this year. They just we have to let that unfold. And from multi multiple um chart time frames, as you said, David, um you know, from my perspective, everything's still bullish here. Before we continue, I want to thank Private Internet Access for sponsoring this video. Using the internet without protection is like mailing a letter without an envelope. anyone can see what you're sending. A VPN solves that problem. 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Could it be uh Chris that if the labor market weakens we could have the Fed lower rates maybe faster than expected? Certainly I I would be betting on more uh Fed easing which may be good for markets. So uh we may be in a period where bad news at least for the broad economy may be good news for the markets. uh POW said last week, risks to inflation are tilted to the upside and risks to employment are to the downside. A challenging situation. So something similar to what you mentioned, the Fed will proceed carefully. Um but he said the shifting balance of risks may warrant adjusting our policy stance. So markets are now pricing in a likely chance of a cut by September. Yeah. So I wonder how Yeah. Yeah. Go ahead. Yeah. I mean, they just they just tweak the odd word here and there and throw in a new little phrase. is I mean I think people read into it way too much. They're always balancing on, you know, they're always saying they're going to make adjustments if it needed. Who cares how they say it? It's the same thing. Uh I I just don't read into the those statements and all that stuff too deeply because they're always weighing everything and they're going to make a change. Um that's why you really just need to follow price, follow the money flow because you don't know what they're going to do, when they're going to do it. And uh it really is, you know, just, you know, their words are like a spell and they suck people in and they just kind of control their they have it nailed down. They know exactly how to say to not quite give enough, but there's no direction and you just always uncertain. So people need to not read into that too much and and actually follow the price charts from multiple time frames as you just said and that'll keep you on the right side of the market. Are you still of the view that markets have entered a phase three per your multi-phase uh outlook and it's uh passed or just at the tipping point of the euphoria phase? Yeah. So if we do take a look at that, this is the stage three chart that you're you're you're talking about and I've talked about how I believe we're in this stage three topping phase for a long time now. There's this the the thing with this where we are in the market environment is we have Magnificent 7 doing a lot of the heavy lifting pulling the NASDAQ and the S&P 500 to new all-time highs not representing this kind of topping phase in most stocks. And if we go back and we look at this particular blend of ETFs now this is the RSP IWM and IWC. This is the more or less broad market. It's equal weighted S&P 500. It's small caps and it's micro caps. If we just zoom out, I mean, in the grand scheme of things, we'll just go way back here. The the stock market isn't breaking new all-time highs. We potentially have a major double top or or triple top, however you want to look at it. We haven't really fully broken out with all stocks to new highs. We're pretty darn close, but we're not there yet. And this is usually, you know, every time we've seen the stock market, the overall stock market get to this level, we have seen a 20 plus% crash in correction. So, we need to be very aware that we're at this tipping point where the market could roll over. I I shared that chart of 2024, how it shows this is kind of right when it went into a nose dive last year and sold off. If we take a look at the seasonality chart of the S&P 500, usually at right at the end of August, the market starts to sell off into October. So, there's a lot of lot of headwinds about to run into this market. And while the trend is still up, you you need to know it might come to an end soon. Um, if you're in positions, you might have to exit them soon. Uh, take a potential loss or start locking in gains. U but overall, the broad market to me is uh in a stage three topping phase. To me, this is that stage three massive topping phase where we could go into a bigger sell-off uh and uh and go into a stage four, a financial reset that could be a 50 plus% crash in some of these indices, which kind of leads over to another chart I'm not sure you and I have ever really shared shared before. If we come down here to the economic and business cycle, now I usually show the stock market cycles, but this one focuses on this yellow cycle, which is the the business the economic cycle. And what's interesting, the cycle in the background, the blue one is the stock market. We're right here near this major top in the stock market. This is where innovation and adaptiveness, adaptation, eagerness really comes into play. And because the innovation right now, it happens to be in tech in large tech that drag the indices up. It's camouflaged this stage three topping phase. So yes, the indices are going up, but it is still really a handful of stocks doing most of it. And that's because we have AI. That's because everybody's adapting and bringing it in, and it's spurring all kinds of work and innovation and costs and sales, and it's keeping the I think the the economy really purring here and holding its ground. But once this phase fizzles out and people realize, okay, well, yeah, AI is great, but it still has a lot to come, you know, to unfold before it really becomes really useful, then I think the markets will roll over. So, we're in this this phase where people feel the innovation and they're applying it. Uh, and it's just another one of those signals that we're got to be aware that, you know, usually when the music's good and everybody's having a good time and you're at the top, there's usually only one place to go, which is down from there. And so we're in this I believe we're slowly maturing through this stage three topping phase through this economic cycle and we're already seeing it with chat GPT. I mean Sam Alman you know really threw a curveball with anybody using chat GPT. He forced ChatGpt 5 on everybody. It's not the best. It has all kinds of issues. Everybody complained right away and within a day they brought chat GPT 4.0 back. They're cutting costs supposedly that new system. Long story short, AI is realizing they need to stop bleeding money and they need to start focusing on efficiency and slow down a bit. Uh so that's where I believe we are in this kind of economic and this business cycle. And once it does start to slow down, we might actually see the economy slow down, jobs potentially start to jobless claims start to go up. I think it's because you've been saying that we've been at a topping phase, phase three, topping phase for quite some time that people have been calling you a perma bear, at least on my channel. Can you address that? Are you a perma bear, Chris? Yeah. Well, I you know what? I guess I'm I'm guilty for it. In fact, I I've written a few uh very interesting articles here. And this one over here, I think people need to read. If you think I'm a perma bear, uh and I drive you nuts with my bearish topping claims, yet I'm always long the markets, which I know gets under people's skin. Uh they need to obviously follow me to to get the full gist of it. But there's I wrote this article about me walking in as a perma bear into a bull market and how I'm guilty for it. But what it really means is it's actually one of the best compliments I could get. But people just see it the wrong way and they don't understand how I go about taking how I go about managing that. And the all these articles here are very very educational. Uh and they help you see how the markets function and they they carry over into position management, risk management, and being a bear. You know, people who are a perma bull. You've got like I just wrote an article about Kathy Woods to Tom Lee. Kathy Woods was the hero. She was the permabil had everybody into the markets uh until until that strategy didn't work and there was no exit plan. Everybody holding the ARC ETFs lost 75 plus%. Tom Lee is the new superhero. He's everywhere. He's super bullish. Always has good for upper forecasts. And this article talks about how that journey starts and ends with all of these different people that come through as mainstream media. And uh so anyways, if people want to hear about my perma my perma bear view and what it actually means, it means I'm always looking out for our portfolio. I'm always focused on protection versus being totally blind to protection and just saying, "Oh, it's going higher. Bye bye bye." Uh which is what everyone else does until the music stops. And then their strategy, most people realize it wasn't a strategy. It was them getting sucked into the markets, getting money under management. That's what these big institutions on Wall Street do. and moving people into their products. But uh yeah, so anyways, that's kind of my my take on on that. But how can you be bearish in the medium term and still be long? Let's just clarify that. Are you long right now? Because last time we talked a couple weeks ago, you were all in cash. We have. Yeah, we Yeah. As if people go back and check the chart, you can see the trend had gone uh neutral. We moved to cash. Uh we moved back into the market. We actually took a Bitcoin trade with one of our strategies. We hit our target, moved out of it. We already locked in gains in our silver miner SILJ trade. We locked in gains on our our um uh communications ETF trade and we're long the indices here. Uh we do we move in and out. And just because I think the sky is falling and I say listen that things are going to get ugly at some point doesn't mean that's where I trade. I just I'm just saying have an exit plan because when it does happen it's going to happen fast and every pause and pullback in the market could be the start of it. No one knows where the markets are going. All we can do is say, "Okay, well, here's the I always just say, "Well, here's the worst case scenario. Let's just be protected for it. And if the market keeps going up, we'll just ride it higher." I hate I I I hate giving out high upward targets. It just sucks people in. Um that's I mean I I just see things differently. I'm very riskoriented. I've been through a bankruptcy. I've blown up multiple trading accounts about 15 20 years ago. I've gone through all that. And I I know sucking investors in with bullish claims is what everyone else does. And what I want to focus on is like let's just know there's going to be a storm coming and it's either you're going to lose your shirt and downgrade your lifestyle and retirement, not be able to retire potentially. Let's just have a game plan and let's always know that storm is brewing and it's you never know when that front is going to hit. And until then, we'll just continue to ride the markets up using technical analysis, risk and position management. And when the storm hits, eventually one of those pullbacks will be the one where we go, "Wow, we totally dodged that bullet, and we just happen to be continuing to grow our money in a different asset class as the stock market falls." So, people always want a a fixed set. They want to know where something's going from here to there. They want to know the numbers. They want exact stuff. The markets don't work that way. Everybody who does that, it's it it's just not true because nobody knows for sure. We can say, "I think it's going here. This is where price should go." I mean, I always talk like a lawyer. Everything is should, could, would hopefully because that's the reality of it. But everybody sticks to anyone in the media who gives like really crisp clear values. This is going to hear, right? Like in the next week or people want that, but it's actually the wrong way to look at the markets and you're going to get you're going to get stuck in some really bad positions and uh people like certainty, but there is no certainty in the markets. And I was on a talk the other day and somebody said, "Chris, you are certain about this move." move and I'm like, I'm not certain about anything. All I'm certain about is we need to protect our money and follow the trends. Like that is the reality of it. But people don't want that, right? They want to say, tell me what to buy. Tell me where it's going. And and they expect it to work. And if it doesn't, they just get angry. But um I I just focus on people who are want to be protective of their capital, of their life savings, and uh their retirement. And I don't, you know, I'm not I'm not shooting out high numbers and trying to suck people into trades. I'm trying to protect people and move them in and out of the market comfortably, casually, uh, to pull money out consistently and compound our money. You know, we don't have a lot of big gains every year, like big trades or we have huge gains, but that's because we take smaller positions that have are we we have a lot of smaller trades, David, that make, you know, one, two, 3% on our portfolio each time. We have 5 to 12 of these every year, but we compound our growth on every trade. So instead of having a huge winner, we have like five or 12 smaller trades that compound on top of each other. And Albert Einstein says one of the most powerful uh uh forces in the universe is compound interest. And that's what we do. We take a handful of small safe trades with our entire portfolio and we just compound it over and over again throughout the year. And we don't care where the market goes. We don't try and pick a top or bottom. we just are happy with chipping away and we end up making higher growth returns than most other strategies anyway because of this because of the compounding and because of our high win rate. You said that people should be aware of this coming brewing storm and you've learned this lesson before yourself which is why you're always constantly aware of this in the background. Well, tell us about some of the mistakes that you've made that have made you hypervigilant. What happened? Yeah. So, uh I mean I think one of the one of the big ones was even when I was a kid, it wasn't even my mistake. It was my parents um got involved with a bad investment and we were living pretty high on the hog and my dad was retired and got involved in something and didn't realize it was a scam or shy who ended up taking all him and his investors capital and we went bankrupt. We went from the top of the food chain to the bottom and um that was a real wakeup call and and after that I had also started trading in the stock market. I learned to trade, buy stocks, sell covered calls. Uh I was kind of only buying stocks that had growth quarter after quarter. I was buying the strongest stocks in the stock market. I took many courses and seminars on how to do this. It was all fundamental pretty much. And then the tech bubble came and even the strongest companies in the world with the best growth uh their stair prices got cut in half and then they got cut in half again. And I I literally blew up my account and I realized that fundamental and news doesn't do anything. You really need to invest in something going up in price or don't own it. And so that's when I flipped to technical analysis. John Murphy, he's known as like the godfather of technical analysis. Big thick book I've read many times. Um learn chart patterns, learn intermarket analysis. That's where I actually shine. I take about 12 different asset classes. We track them all. We have different ratios and we get an idea of what the sentiment is doing. And and I follow not only the price trends, but we want to make sure there's enough sentiment behind it to push that wave. And you and I have talked about this in the past. The stock market to me is like the ocean. When the tide goes up, what happens to all boats? Well, when the stock market goes up, what happens to most stocks? They go up. But when we're in a bearish environment and the tide is going down, you don't want to hold stocks. I don't care what sector it is. If you look at pretty much every sector in the stock market during a bare market, they go down. So, I move away from assets. I move away from equities in total. Uh, when we're in a downtrend, period, whether it's a two-e downtrend or a multi-year bare market, we don't know what it's going to be, so we move aside. And I've blown up multiple accounts doing this. I used to day trade futures. I blew up a futures account in one trading day. That was the last account I blew up. I funded it. It was a revenge day. Hey, I was trying to make back the account I blew up like a month earlier. And um so I have I have lost my money slowly over time from fundamentals and wasted years. And then I have also blow up my blown up my money being an aggressive trader in one day. And I've done that a couple of times. Um so that's those are all my war wounds and I've been through it and now it's like how can I just grow my entire portfolio and not have to worry about the news or tariffs or the Fed or economic data and just just follow price. it it you know we have a lot of subscribers that follow my stuff and they there's one common theme a couple they're like I wish I found you decades ago I sleep better at night I don't get as much FOMO and and fear anymore because I touch on these like every day in our morning video I said you might be feeling fear because we have indicators that will tell us when the mass market is fearful they're panicking or when they feel like they're missing out on a trend so I'm kind of just that voice of reason I've been told I'm the David Atenboroough of the stock market Uh, so like you know I just have very different view and different angle. I'm not out swinging for the fences. I'm just like how can savvy investors grow our money in a very comfortable way and never have to worry about risking our shirts and uh and lifestyle. Okay. Well, Chris, the uh other way to look at it is okay, you've got your strategy which keeps people safe, sleeping at night, no nightmares. I could just also sleep at night with no nightmares and no fears and no uh worries to think about if I just put my money away in the S&P 500 and go away in 20 and 30 years and my retirement will be fine because historically that's worked out well for people who have done that and and 100%. And a kid could do that. I'm not helping kids. I'm helping people who have money who are close to retirement who are retired who don't have 30 years. Right? So that's that's where I'm focused on. So there's obviously every investor has a totally different need and time horizon. I'm focusing on myself where I'm at and everybody where I'm at and ahead of me um so that we don't have to worry about any of that stuff. But the buy and hold works. You hold for 30 years. You should do exceptionally well. But here's the thing with the buy and hold. You will never retire early. You need that 30 or 40 years because you're going to have decade or two in there of no returns where markets are always just recovering from recent highs, all of that stuff. So again, I'm just I focus on one particular side of investing for a certain age group. Um that's that's my that's my sweet spot. Okay, let's move on to uh oil. I want to show an oil chart here. Sure. Yeah, oil has been sliding down all year and uh just today big rebound. Um actually, if you just zoom in a couple days, it's been kind of on the rebound, but uh I'll let you comment on whether or not this is the start of a trend or um just noise. Yeah, at at this point I think it's noise. I think it's um I actually covered this this morning with subscribers that we're in this short-term downtrend. It's been kind of trading sideways. And what I find gold and oil like to do this a lot. They create this what I call a little hook. So, a lot of people be building a bearish pattern or a position expecting this to go lower. But what happens is you have a little bit of a hook up. Price starts to break some of these recent highs. The shorts start to get nervous. They're on the wrong side. uh people also start to get bullish and they buy and it creates a a green bar up and then what it does is it gets the shorts out, spooks them out, gets people long and then of course it sells off afterwards. We saw something like this uh several months ago. We sold off, it started to put in a consolidation and then boom, it has a short squeeze, a little bit of a pop, a hook up, and then it goes back down. And so the markets are really good at doing this. I don't see this being a strong move up at this point. I think it's really just a little bit of a more of a trading play. If we zoom out on the chart and we draw a line across like major major resistance through here, uh price is kind of still stuck under key resistance and you and I touched on this in our last talk. This big spike up here, I think it was news driven. Uh it goes up for a couple days, everybody chases the news, they feel like they're getting left behind, and then it rolls over and takes all their money, who whoever got long chasing it. And so that has to be negated. just forget about that news driven pop. Uh, and oil has fallen right back down into the downtrend under resistance and it might still want to go a bit higher, but I think it's just a bounce within a downtrend. What about the other commodities? Let's take a look at gold. Gold has been just consolidating in a range for months now. What's going on with gold? Yeah, I really like gold. I mean, gold is gold has done many of these where, you know, it it has this big rally up and then it consolidates for months and then has a rally, consolidates for months, has a rally. Uh, gold has been warning us for a long time. It's a top performing asset long-term. It's near all-time highs. It has a very strong bull chart, a bull flag pattern that points to about $4,100 if this move plays out, maybe even a whole lot higher. But gold is warning us that something is wrong. the fact that it keeps uh it's holding its value and going up long term here is the sign that people around the world are nervous and I think you know gold sometimes the market there's a couple sayings sometimes the market will if it can't shake you out it will wait you out and that is what it's doing people are starting I I I'm hearing some technical analysts getting really bearish on gold saying that gold's about to fall it's going to have a big drop which I do think will happen but not until the economy and everything turn over and we potentially go into a stock market, a bare market. I think that'll pull gold down. But, um, it's funny. It's Oh, sorry. A bare market will pull gold down. A bare market in stocks will pull gold down eventually. Uh, just because of the selling pressure, the mass liquidation, and we saw this in 2008, uh, when once the stock market starts to pick up a lot of speed and sells off with huge volume and panic, gold usually gets sold off with it. But before that happens, gold usually shoots up. It'll go higher for a little while, for potentially a month or two as the stock market starts to sell off. So, I'm not really worried about gold. Uh right now though, there's no doubt it's gone sideways so long people are giving up on it. They're starting to go bearish. They're moving into gold miners because they're like, I need to get into something that's moving. This is gold. Gold is boring. And silver is starting to move and break out, right? And so, people are moving away from gold. that's usually a sign that gold's about ready to actually make a move. Um, so I like gold and silver and I I do think they have potential for one to two months upward movement and I think it could be, you know, 20 plus% for both of them, which would put up near $50 an ounce. Uh, wait, sorry. When's that going to happen? This year, next year? I I would think it's going to happen this year. I mean, uh, I don't know for sure, but the chart pattern is based on it should h it should start to happen pretty much any week here. It should start to break out and start to run. I want to talk about silver and finish off on silver in just a minute, but before that, I have two observations on gold. I'd like you to comment on. So, first of all, on the analysis that people have that, you know, this is about to break down to the downside because it's been consolidating for so long. Typically, that's not what happens to gold. If you just take a look at the chart historically and zoom out and take a look at what what has happened in the past, whenever gold has stalled for for months or maybe even years on end, uh typically what happens is um it breaks out to the upside. Uh a few notable exceptions is 2011 and 2011 was an exception because gold has typically only fallen when it's just spiked up and then immediately fallen. So then this isn't really a consolidating pattern because in 2011 it's gone up and then immediately fell. Um and then a multi-year consolidating pattern led to a breakout. As you can see here in 2022, this is what you were talking about. This is the second observation. Um in 2022 when stocks go down, that's when you know there's a lot of selling pressure overall in the markets that could bring to gold down as well. That's what happened to gold in 2022. Went down 20%. Yeah. So I'll let you comment on both of those things. Yeah, I think you're right. I think uh I think right where right right where we are in gold right now where it's been consolidating uh I I think it's very close to popping. In fact, if we were to go right over to 2007, gold went sideways for many many months and then suddenly just before just as the stock market was starting to roll over, gold shot higher and it and it rocketed up about 37% something like that. And so I this this huge pattern is like exactly kind of where we're at right now when we look at gold. It's had this big run up. It's been trading sideways for months. And I think we have one more big push. And I think you're right, David. I think you know it is a pause and consolidation at this point. You have to expect it to go higher. There are to me I don't see anything bearish about this chart pattern. It's um you know it really is pointing to higher pricing. It's kind of it in a nutshell. Okay. Silver. You like silver more. or less than gold right now. Um, silver silver's got some it it has potential to have a decent move. I mean, it could actually pop and rally to if we were to go all the way back. I think it could go spike up to that $50 mark. I think we could potentially see it pick up speed in the next month or two and shoot up and try and hit all-time highs. I think gold will rally at the same time. Miners, silver is is really difficult. You just never know when it's going to have one of these explosive parabolic moves and shoot up. It has has a lot of energy built up. It's a small market. A lot of people are watching it, accumulating it, and when it starts to run, it becomes a very crowded trade very quickly, which is what drives it up. Uh, at this point, I mean, I see it going to about $41 an ounce, but depending on how this unfolds, I think we could see a much a much bigger explosion to the upside. And it might have a blowoff phase where we go right back into this 50 mark. And this will this will probably be exactly what you said, David. When gold and silver have that spike up, that's usually also when they come straight back down. So, I think this will be that blowoff spike move that puts a top in gold and silver temporarily and then we potentially start to see it sell off. Okay, Chris, uh, final question because because we were talking about retirement earlier. When should somebody prep for retirement or start preparing for retirement? Oh, man. I don't know. There's so many different ways to do it. Do you like um the theory I've heard from PE retirement planners is you should start as early as possible. The moment you get your first paycheck after college, that's when you should be thinking about retirement. 100 Yeah, 100%. Most people don't. I I'm a long-term planner. I mean, I have multiple uh whole life insurance policy, un universal life insurance policies I did long time ago that are funded and they really like lotto tickets later in life. I think if people can get into something like that at an early age when premiums are low and you can put money away every year and it ends up giving you this huge tax-free kind of income surge down the road, I think the sooner somebody could do that, even if you're in your 30s, it's not too late. Uh, but time is money for those type of investments. I think people should also look at buying into, you know, buying into real estate. I think buying a duplex, triplex or quad is one of the smartest things you could do at a young age. You can live in one. If the tenant doesn't show up or you miss one for another, it's like the whole mortgage is on you. Eventually, you'll buy another house and you can rent that out and you'll have two, three, or four doors paying you 25, 3,500 bucks a month. You'll have cash for life plus an asset going up. There's so many ways to plan for retirement. Um, young people can get into real estate because it requires tons of leverage. You get a mortgage. Usually, young people don't have big lumps of money to trade with. So, that's why real estate, I think, is a very smart play at a younger age. You get a lot more leverage and borrow a lot more money. And um, but yeah, people should people should look into it right away. I think if they were to speak with the right financial planner at a young age and see the different options, they'll be like there's like five avenues or four avenues you can do and you can do each one a little bit um that aren't life-changing and require a little bit of discipline. People don't like discipline unfortunately and a lot of people don't have any uh which is a lot of times why people are stuck where they are financially. Um success requires discipline. I don't care what kind of success it is, you have to be disciplined in whatever it is. And the more discipline you have, usually the more successful you are across the board. Um, so yeah, the younger the age, there is no too, you're never too young to plan long term and know your options and and drift towards them at least. Uh, have them in the back of your mind. Okay. Thank you very much, Chris. So stay disciplined and follow Chris in the link down below. We'll put the uh link to Chris's work down below so you can learn more about his trading strategies and asset revesting, which is a strategy that he employs. We'll see you next time, Chris. Welcome back to the show. Good to see you as always. Take care. Uh take care for now. Thanks, David. Appreciate it. Take care. Thank you for watching. Don't forget to like and subscribe.