Market Outlook: Elevated positioning and policy uncertainty point to heightened volatility, with potential corrections extending toward the midterms.
Sector Rotation: MAG7 weakness contrasts with improving breadth and equal-weight strength as materials, healthcare, industrials, defense, and financials lead.
US Dollar: Despite a prevailing bearish thesis, DXY resilience near 98–99 keeps the trend neutral pending a decisive breakout or breakdown.
Crude Oil: Venezuela supply fears are overdone near term; fundamentals suggest no imminent flood, with price action hinting at a possible basing if bad news fails to make new lows.
Gold: Bull trend intact despite a corrective dip and BCOM rebalancing risk; outlook targets 4,900–5,100 over coming months if momentum resumes.
Uranium: Bullish momentum returning as enrichment buildout boosts long-term demand; URA is key for institutional flows and has broken out from consolidation.
Copper: Breakout to a $6 handle confirms a bull trend, though near-term overextension risks exist with upside targets toward 6.40–6.50.
Treasury Yields: The 10-year sits in limbo; upcoming data (e.g., jobs) could drive a breakout above 4.20% or a move back below the 50-day.
Transcript
This is Macrovoices, the free weekly financial podcast targeting professional finance, [music] high- netw worth individuals, family offices, and other sophisticated investors. Macrovoices [music] is all about the brightest minds in the world of finance and macroeconomics telling it like it is. Bullish or bearish, no holds barred. Now, here are your hosts, Eric Townsend and Patrick Szna. Eric, it was great to have Darius back on the show. Now, listeners, you're going to find the download link for the postgame chart deck in your research roundup email. If you don't have a research roundup email, that means you have not yet registered at macrovoices.com. Go to our homepage, macrovoices.com, and click on the red button over Darius's picture saying looking for the downloads. Patrick Darius had quite a few interesting market takes. What's on deck for this week's trade of the week? Eric, what really stood out for me in Darius's work is just how extreme this crowded bullish positioning has become. His positioning model is sitting near the most extended levels he's ever seen both on a mean and median basis, which statistically lines up with a much higher probability of bad outcomes over the next 1 to 3 months. not necessarily a crash, but either a meaningful correction or some pretty violent chop as the froth gets burned off. So, for this week's trade of the week, I want to respect that setup and walk through a way to stay broadly constructive on the cycle, but explicitly hedge the nearterm positioning risk. To express that, I'm structuring a 95 by 85 put spread on the S&P 500 index with the index around 6920. That means buying the April 16th 6600 put about 98 days till expiration for about 106 and financing part of that by selling the April 5900 put for around 36 for a net debit of roughly 70 index points. call it about 1% of the index level. Structurally, that gives you a defined risk hedge that kicks in about 5% below spot and runs protection down to roughly 15% lower. The spread is 700 points wide. So, you're laying out about 70 to make up to 630 if we get a proper flush into that zone. roughly a nineto- one payoff on a move that lines up very well with the kind of one to threemonth correction Darius is worried about while only costing about 1% in carry to have this insurance on. Patrick, every Monday at Big Picture Trading, your webinar explains how retail investors can put on our most recent trade of the week. For those listeners that want to explore how to put on these trades in greater detail, don't miss out on a 14-day free trial at bigpicturetrading.com. Now, let's dive in to the postgame chart deck. All right, Eric, let's get to these equity markets. What are you thinking here? Well, Patrick, my view has similarities to Darius's take, but I look at this from a slightly different angle. The Trump administration is getting bolder and bolder in their policy initiatives. Now, if and that's a big big if, if they are successful in all these endeavors and pull off the objectives that they have without running into either court or uh opposing political party uh resistance and can actually achieve the things they're setting out to do. I think it's strongly positive for equity markets, but we're into regime change operations that Trump specifically campaigned to end. And now we're seeing factions of the Republican party no longer supporting him. Meanwhile, he's just doubling down with talk of, you know, Greenland, Colombia, Mexico, Cuba. It's uh almost anybody's guess as to where the next uh act of adventurism in the world is going to occur from the Trump administration. If the president's initiatives meet sufficient political resistance or court injunctions, that whole story could derail and derail quickly, bringing about an abrupt and deep correction in equity markets. So my view is similar to Darius's in the sense that I think volatility will be the name of the game in 2026 with plenty of upside uh possible by the time it's over. But I also see a very real possibility of a strongly negative outlook depending on how these bold policy initiatives uh work out, whether they're derailed by his political opponents and so forth. So, I don't see it quite the way that Darius does in the sense of uh we'll get through the turbulence in the first few months. I think that that turbulence could potentially last through the midterm elections in November. So, most of the year, we'll see what happens. Well, Eric, I want to take a look under the hood and better understand what's happening in these markets. Now, Darius has shared uh where we are on the state of the market, but from a price action perspective, the market is still currently behaving, making higher highs, higher lows. But what is interesting is the sector rotation that's going on underneath. On page four, I have a a chart of the MAG 7 ETF showing those seven behemoth large market cap stocks and the fact that they're materially not participating on the upside and in fact remain below their 50-day moving average. So overall we're seeing that you know these stocks that represent onethird of the um uh of the S&P 500 index from a market cap waiting uh are simply not participating in this and it's creating a drag on the market that is creating a divergent momentum. But when we then look at the rest of the market, uh on page five, I have the breath uh by looking at the number of stocks trading above their 50-day moving average. And we're on this index uh trading up uh at the highest level in several months up in around 61%. Well, we're nowhere near overbought conditions on this where we would trade normally up to 70 80%. Uh but it's been improving. And so on page six, I'm showing the S&P 500, but the equal weight index, which removes the market cap waiting and makes them all obviously equal in their influence. What we can see here is that this has legitimately bullishly broken out demonstrating that breath, that widening uh that's happening. Uh and so what sectors have been performing well over the last month? basic materials uh are up almost 10%. The health care stocks have been working. The industrial stocks and and defense contractors have been ripping and the financials have been incredibly strong. So you're seeing uh the this one component of the market driving but the technology and mag sevens are a huge drag and so there's a sector rotation going on. The question is, is this so sector rotation the theme of the next couple weeks or is the lack of participation of the MAG 7 an indication that uh the market is exhausting itself and we're going to see Darius's scenario develop at this moment. There's no technical evidence of that and it's probably going to need some sort of a trigger. Uh will something like the jobs numbers be that trigger? We're going to find out. Uh but as of this moment, uh it's a a market that is just set to rotating under the surface. All right, Eric, let's talk about this dollar. I'm still in the dollar down camp in terms of overall direction, but with the big caveat that there's plenty of room for a big rip higher if certain policy initiatives on the table play out. It seems like the president is getting less and less bashful about really bold policy initiatives, even some that frustrate members of his own party. So, my overall bias is still down for the US dollar. But I definitely agree with Darius that volatility is going to be the name of the game, especially for the first few months of the year. Well, Eric, at least from the sources that I follow, there's a pretty predominant US dollar bear thesis going out there. But what continues to be particularly interesting here is that in spite of all of that, there was an opportunity for the dollar index to break down below that critical 98 level to really solidify a downtrend. But instead, that support line has held. And while I wouldn't want to call this a bullish breakout on the dollar index, it's certainly strengthening off its worst levels after establishing a double bottom throughout the uh third quarter of the year. We have a scenario now where the dollar just isn't breaking down. It's more consolidating sideways. And so the question here is what where is the next surprise move? Well, to me, I I'm keeping it super simple. This onepoint range between 98 to 99 has been a consolidation area and a neutral zone that I the way I put in in that context. And so if we had a legitimate technical breakout above 99, it would uh indicate that some sort of new accumulation is being introduced into the dollar that may drive a short-term trend. Will we get that breakout or will the US dollar stay in its primary downtrend is uh pretty much going to be decided right here as we are testing this 50-day moving average right near that 99 level. So let's see how this plays out. All right, Eric, we got to talk about oil. Okay, I think the segment of market participants who are not oil trading professionals are frankly very badly misinterpreting the relevance and uh timesensitive relevance of the Venezuelan news to the market outlook, creating an artificially bearish short-term sentiment that frankly just doesn't jive with the actual fundamentals. Commodity markets, especially the oil market, cannot be forwardlooking like equity markets. Even though people see things coming, the market has to balance supply and demand in the here and now. And the reason particularly with crude oil is if we don't have any place to store the oil. If too much is being produced, it leads to real problems. If not enough is being produced, it leads to even worse problems. So we've got to balance in the here and now. That means that commodity markets cannot be forward-looking, but they are subject to big swings as speculative repositioning reacts to perceptions in the market as is happening right now. Now, the idea that Venezuelan oil is going to flood the crude oil market and crash prices starting next week is just plain silly. The first thing that happened last week was people jumped to that conclusion thinking, "Okay, President Trump just took all the oil from Venezuela. He's going to, you know, send the oil companies in. They're going to start producing oil next month and uh it's going to just flood the market." Our friend Dr. Anna Alhaji took a very careful look at this. He did a about an hourong presentation on it on uh Twitter spaces that is uh recorded and available. I strongly encourage anyone interested in the oil market to listen to that full interview with Dr. Anna Alhaji. That's linked in your research roundup email. But what he said is to bring just 1 million barrels of additional Venezuelan production back online will take at least 3 years. So that's good news for the coming energy crisis, but it doesn't affect the 2026 outlook for oil prices at all, save for some repositioning overshoots as we're seeing right now. So, by 9:00 a.m. on Tuesday, we were back up to the 50-day moving average resistance line. Looked like the market was about to break out higher because the cooler heads, the more knowledgeable oil traders were correctly understanding that, you know, we're not going to flood the market next week or next month with Venezuelan oil. That's a story that's years down the road, not weeks down the road. Then came President Trump's announcement that Venezuela would immediately turn over 30 to 50 million barrels of oil. Wow, that's a lot of oil. Well, actually, when you consider that we generally measure in millions of barrels per day of oil production, 30 to 50 million barrels one-time shot is not as much as it sounds like, first of all. But the question to ask then was after President Trump said Venezuela is going to be turning over 30 to 50 million barrels of oil immediately. Question everybody should have asked is oh well that's interesting. Does Venezuela actually have 30 to 50 million barrels of oil that they could turn over even if that was what was agreed to? That perception though that they were suddenly going to flood the market with that oil brought us back to the oh boy it's going to crash prices and that led to more investor sentimentd driven selling. The dumb money started selling handoverfist taking WTI crude back down to a 55 handle by Tuesday's close. Just one little detail nobody uh bothered to ask about is do they actually have that oil? No, they don't. Say both Dr. Anna Alhaji and also our other good friend in the oil business Rory Johnston. I reached out to both of them on Twitter and they responded very quickly saying basically no way. Dr. Anna Alhaji says maybe there's 11 to 12 million barrels of floating storage in Venezuela maximum. Uh there may also be some landbased storage, but even if they had the maximum number that anybody thinks, which is maybe 15 million barrels, that gets you to 20 to 25 million barrels total, every drop of uh oil that they might have. So turning over 50 million barrels next week or whatever the the president announced ain't going to happen. It's still more importantly even if it did happen that 50 million barrels would you know only really change the market for a matter of weeks before it was absorbed into the market it's still going to take 3 years or more per Dr. Alhaji in order to bring another million barrels a day of Venezuelan production online and it's going to take lots of investment in order for that to happen. Now, it does seem like the Trump administration is poised to potentially subsidize that investment and make it happen quickly. Uh, but there's also the question of whether he will face political and court opposition to his efforts to do so. Now to be clear, I personally can eventually see a very plausible scenario where if this is allowed to continue, it could eventually lead to the point where Venezuela really does become a gamecher in the coming energy crisis that I have predicted. Perhaps supplying as much as 5 million barrels a day of exports after being fully developed. What does that mean? That means that story will play out in the mid 2030s. long after Trump is out of office and probably not on the scale that I just described of 5 million barrels a day until after the 2032 elections, two more election cycles from now. So, this is a long-term story. If we were to really get all of Venezuela, which is the largest oil reserves, even bigger than uh Saudi Arabia in the world, it would take a decade and massive, you know, tens if not hundreds of billions of dollars of investment in order to get that really happening. Our producers are already working to get both Rory Johnston and Dr. Anna Alhaji back on the show in coming weeks. We'll get you more perspective on this oil market as this story develops. Well, Eric, first off, we have to highlight that crude oil technically remains in a very clear downtrend. It's uh repetitively making lower highs and failing at the 50-day moving average. Uh when you can basically connect a descending trend line along all those highs to depict that downtrend. Now, what we are seeing though is negative news and crude oil really isn't selling off hard on negative news and it's certainly not making lower lows. And to me, if we see a scenario where there's bad news and crude oil stops breaking down on that bad news, um then that means that we found a new fair value zone for crude and it could be a trading bottom that it is established. is incredibly premature to make a bull call here. But one of the things to solve here in the first month of the year is uh are we seeing a basing formation developing on crude or does the prevailing downtrend still take it to the next level down? Overall, it would take a legitimate breakout above the $60 level to bullishly turn this trend up. And that's still just so far away. And so there's going to need to be some real momentum shift for the bulls to even have a shot here. All right, Erica, let's talk about these precious metals. What's going on here in gold? The sharp correction in the last few days of the year was easy to see coming. And hey, we warned you about it several times here on Macrovoices. So hopefully none of our listeners got hurt in that move. I added 10% to my longs on the retest of the breakout region at 2370 and then I added another 15% at 2300 even. So, I'm now up 25% on my position size after buying this dip in size. The correction cleared out the extreme overbought stochastics. As much as the fundamentals were strong, as I've been warning for weeks, we were flashing extreme overbought on those short-term technical stoastics oscillators that now we've gone all the way back down, at least on the slow stochastics and almost all the way there on the RSI to an oversold condition on the short-term chart. That clears the way for a substantive move higher. And I'm convinced that the medium to long-term fundamentals are still super bullish. The Trump administration isn't about to back away from its bold policy initiatives, and that only strengthens the argument for central banks to continue to diversify out of treasuries into more gold. But there is a short-term risk on the near horizon. So, this correction that we've just seen might not necessarily be over yet. It could be that the uh final low is still to come. And believe me, if it gets down to 4,200, I'll be buying more. What's on the horizon is this. The Bloomberg commodity index is going to be rebalancing the the it's a scheduled event January 9th through 15th. Basically, what's happening is that commodity index because gold has performed so well. It's creating forced selling for the various funds that track the BCOM index. They have to sell. It's not a discretionary thing. They have to sell and they have to sell between the 9th and the 15th of January. So the correction that we just saw could have been front runners anticipating that move and you never know how these scheduled things are going to play out. It's obvious, you know, to think, oh well that means if they're going to sell, it's going to force the price down. But of course, people saw that coming. They were front running it. They game it. And sometimes it actually ends up doing the opposite of what you thought when the actual uh event happens. So we'll see how this plays out. But if we do get down to a new low, uh, an undercut low, and especially if it gets down as low as 4,200, I'll be adding even more to my longs, uh, closer to the 15th of January when that forced selling should wind down because I'm convinced that we are setting the stage here for the next major leg higher, targeting somewhere between 4,900 and 5,100 over the next several months. But again, that risk between now and January 15th is for potentially some turbulence in the market. Well, Eric, there's a very clean bull trend in gold. Uh, still very well underway. Old dips keeping being bought. Even that one big down day that we had uh was uh very quickly bought on dip and gold pushed right back to its previous high. So, we're in a situation where there's just no argument that the bulls remain in control of this trend. The bigger question is is that are we going to see the other precious metals uh come under some selling pressure and does that take a little bit of the steam out of this huge bull momentum that we're seeing or is this thing going to just keep plugging away? Uh overall there are measured moves up to 4,900 even 5,000 on the upside. Uh, and so if we can get that breakout to a 52- week high, then uh there's no reason why we can't tack on $300 more an ounce in the first quarter of the year. All right, Eric, let's touch on uranium and uranium stocks here. Well, Patrick, the uranium miners mostly closed up and near their intraday highs on Wednesday, even as the S&P was modestly down on the day. And that's yet another sign that this market is heating up and we're seeing uranium and uranium equities breaking away from mainstream stock market and really accelerating what I think is a very strong bull market that's been in a technical correction since the 15th of October. Looks like that's finally ending and we're maybe about to break substantially higher. Let's see how that plays out. We're seeing more and more bullish fundamentals with announcements from uh energy secretary Chris Wright almost daily now coming out as he continues to talk up the formative nuclear renaissance. The strong case for increasing America's enrichment capability which will increase demand. One of the cautions that I've described in the past for this uranium bull market is, hey, you only got a certain amount of demand that's possible based on the amount of enrichment capacity that we have, and Russia controls a lot of it. By the way, well, as we're now aggressively building out more uranium uh enrichment capacity, it just speaks of more demand coming for uranium in coming years. A few names like NextGen Energy have already broken out well above their October 15th highs when this technical correction started. Others like Dennis Mines are almost there. The ETFs are lagging behind particularly the URA ETF which has quite a few uh small modular reactor names like Oaklo and new scale in their portfolio. Those are not performing as well as the uranium stocks have been in the last couple of weeks. That's the reason URRA is kind of the lagard there. but it has already broken out of its symmetrical triangle pattern to the upside. That ETF is particularly important because a lot of the institutional money follows that one. It's where it's the one that has the most liquidity and it also has the only liquid enough options chain to support options trading on uh the underlying uranium in investments in size. So, URRA is a very important name in this market and it is uh already starting to break out catching up to some of its pure uranium play peers which are already much higher. So, all signs are bullish. The one big risk still on the table is the unwind of the AI trade that would clobber all things including uh uranium stocks or all things nuclear including uranium stocks. The bull thesis for uranium itself does not in any way, shape or form rely on AI. But, you know, that's not how markets work. If AI unwinds, so will the uranium miners just because of basketing of the uranium miners into AI trading baskets and it will be a big buy the dip opportunity if it should happen. Well, I agree with your views there, Eric. We certainly saw a technical turnup in uranium and so it'll be very interesting to see whether the bulls can follow through because you can see that uh certainly a few of these individual names are really pressing while the URRA ATF continues to drag a little bit. But when we're looking at uranium itself, this kind of 80 to $85 has been a substantial resistance point for the entire fourth quarter of the year. And so the question here is will we see the underlying commodity start the year with a breakout to a higher high that could certainly add some bullish tailwind to the whole story throughout the first quarter. Now I also wanted to just touch on the copper chart here on page 11. And we saw a breakout to a fresh new high clearing that tariff pop that we had back in July. Seeing the $6 handle finally hit. We're uh in a very clear bull market on copper, but the question is is that uh is the this move already a little bit overextended. Certainly some of the upside targets uh for a bull continuation could see 640 650 hit on the upside. Let's see whether the copper bulls can keep this going. Patrick, before we wrap up this week's show, let's hit that 10-year Treasury note chart. Yeah. So, the 10-year Treasury yield has been in a purgatory limbo uh for the entire month of December and rightfully so. Things got quiet and uh there is a lot of data that is needed for the uh Fed to know whether to pivot on their policy path. So, at this juncture, the first news will be the jobs numbers here on Friday. And now, will it be an outlier number or is it just going to come in line? It certainly is the first trigger point that could get things uh moving again here. Uh whether or not we're going to get a breakout above the 420 level or whether we're back under that 50-day moving average could be decided early next week. 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Trade of The Week – MacroVoices #514
Summary
Transcript
This is Macrovoices, the free weekly financial podcast targeting professional finance, [music] high- netw worth individuals, family offices, and other sophisticated investors. Macrovoices [music] is all about the brightest minds in the world of finance and macroeconomics telling it like it is. Bullish or bearish, no holds barred. Now, here are your hosts, Eric Townsend and Patrick Szna. Eric, it was great to have Darius back on the show. Now, listeners, you're going to find the download link for the postgame chart deck in your research roundup email. If you don't have a research roundup email, that means you have not yet registered at macrovoices.com. Go to our homepage, macrovoices.com, and click on the red button over Darius's picture saying looking for the downloads. Patrick Darius had quite a few interesting market takes. What's on deck for this week's trade of the week? Eric, what really stood out for me in Darius's work is just how extreme this crowded bullish positioning has become. His positioning model is sitting near the most extended levels he's ever seen both on a mean and median basis, which statistically lines up with a much higher probability of bad outcomes over the next 1 to 3 months. not necessarily a crash, but either a meaningful correction or some pretty violent chop as the froth gets burned off. So, for this week's trade of the week, I want to respect that setup and walk through a way to stay broadly constructive on the cycle, but explicitly hedge the nearterm positioning risk. To express that, I'm structuring a 95 by 85 put spread on the S&P 500 index with the index around 6920. That means buying the April 16th 6600 put about 98 days till expiration for about 106 and financing part of that by selling the April 5900 put for around 36 for a net debit of roughly 70 index points. call it about 1% of the index level. Structurally, that gives you a defined risk hedge that kicks in about 5% below spot and runs protection down to roughly 15% lower. The spread is 700 points wide. So, you're laying out about 70 to make up to 630 if we get a proper flush into that zone. roughly a nineto- one payoff on a move that lines up very well with the kind of one to threemonth correction Darius is worried about while only costing about 1% in carry to have this insurance on. Patrick, every Monday at Big Picture Trading, your webinar explains how retail investors can put on our most recent trade of the week. For those listeners that want to explore how to put on these trades in greater detail, don't miss out on a 14-day free trial at bigpicturetrading.com. Now, let's dive in to the postgame chart deck. All right, Eric, let's get to these equity markets. What are you thinking here? Well, Patrick, my view has similarities to Darius's take, but I look at this from a slightly different angle. The Trump administration is getting bolder and bolder in their policy initiatives. Now, if and that's a big big if, if they are successful in all these endeavors and pull off the objectives that they have without running into either court or uh opposing political party uh resistance and can actually achieve the things they're setting out to do. I think it's strongly positive for equity markets, but we're into regime change operations that Trump specifically campaigned to end. And now we're seeing factions of the Republican party no longer supporting him. Meanwhile, he's just doubling down with talk of, you know, Greenland, Colombia, Mexico, Cuba. It's uh almost anybody's guess as to where the next uh act of adventurism in the world is going to occur from the Trump administration. If the president's initiatives meet sufficient political resistance or court injunctions, that whole story could derail and derail quickly, bringing about an abrupt and deep correction in equity markets. So my view is similar to Darius's in the sense that I think volatility will be the name of the game in 2026 with plenty of upside uh possible by the time it's over. But I also see a very real possibility of a strongly negative outlook depending on how these bold policy initiatives uh work out, whether they're derailed by his political opponents and so forth. So, I don't see it quite the way that Darius does in the sense of uh we'll get through the turbulence in the first few months. I think that that turbulence could potentially last through the midterm elections in November. So, most of the year, we'll see what happens. Well, Eric, I want to take a look under the hood and better understand what's happening in these markets. Now, Darius has shared uh where we are on the state of the market, but from a price action perspective, the market is still currently behaving, making higher highs, higher lows. But what is interesting is the sector rotation that's going on underneath. On page four, I have a a chart of the MAG 7 ETF showing those seven behemoth large market cap stocks and the fact that they're materially not participating on the upside and in fact remain below their 50-day moving average. So overall we're seeing that you know these stocks that represent onethird of the um uh of the S&P 500 index from a market cap waiting uh are simply not participating in this and it's creating a drag on the market that is creating a divergent momentum. But when we then look at the rest of the market, uh on page five, I have the breath uh by looking at the number of stocks trading above their 50-day moving average. And we're on this index uh trading up uh at the highest level in several months up in around 61%. Well, we're nowhere near overbought conditions on this where we would trade normally up to 70 80%. Uh but it's been improving. And so on page six, I'm showing the S&P 500, but the equal weight index, which removes the market cap waiting and makes them all obviously equal in their influence. What we can see here is that this has legitimately bullishly broken out demonstrating that breath, that widening uh that's happening. Uh and so what sectors have been performing well over the last month? basic materials uh are up almost 10%. The health care stocks have been working. The industrial stocks and and defense contractors have been ripping and the financials have been incredibly strong. So you're seeing uh the this one component of the market driving but the technology and mag sevens are a huge drag and so there's a sector rotation going on. The question is, is this so sector rotation the theme of the next couple weeks or is the lack of participation of the MAG 7 an indication that uh the market is exhausting itself and we're going to see Darius's scenario develop at this moment. There's no technical evidence of that and it's probably going to need some sort of a trigger. Uh will something like the jobs numbers be that trigger? We're going to find out. Uh but as of this moment, uh it's a a market that is just set to rotating under the surface. All right, Eric, let's talk about this dollar. I'm still in the dollar down camp in terms of overall direction, but with the big caveat that there's plenty of room for a big rip higher if certain policy initiatives on the table play out. It seems like the president is getting less and less bashful about really bold policy initiatives, even some that frustrate members of his own party. So, my overall bias is still down for the US dollar. But I definitely agree with Darius that volatility is going to be the name of the game, especially for the first few months of the year. Well, Eric, at least from the sources that I follow, there's a pretty predominant US dollar bear thesis going out there. But what continues to be particularly interesting here is that in spite of all of that, there was an opportunity for the dollar index to break down below that critical 98 level to really solidify a downtrend. But instead, that support line has held. And while I wouldn't want to call this a bullish breakout on the dollar index, it's certainly strengthening off its worst levels after establishing a double bottom throughout the uh third quarter of the year. We have a scenario now where the dollar just isn't breaking down. It's more consolidating sideways. And so the question here is what where is the next surprise move? Well, to me, I I'm keeping it super simple. This onepoint range between 98 to 99 has been a consolidation area and a neutral zone that I the way I put in in that context. And so if we had a legitimate technical breakout above 99, it would uh indicate that some sort of new accumulation is being introduced into the dollar that may drive a short-term trend. Will we get that breakout or will the US dollar stay in its primary downtrend is uh pretty much going to be decided right here as we are testing this 50-day moving average right near that 99 level. So let's see how this plays out. All right, Eric, we got to talk about oil. Okay, I think the segment of market participants who are not oil trading professionals are frankly very badly misinterpreting the relevance and uh timesensitive relevance of the Venezuelan news to the market outlook, creating an artificially bearish short-term sentiment that frankly just doesn't jive with the actual fundamentals. Commodity markets, especially the oil market, cannot be forwardlooking like equity markets. Even though people see things coming, the market has to balance supply and demand in the here and now. And the reason particularly with crude oil is if we don't have any place to store the oil. If too much is being produced, it leads to real problems. If not enough is being produced, it leads to even worse problems. So we've got to balance in the here and now. That means that commodity markets cannot be forward-looking, but they are subject to big swings as speculative repositioning reacts to perceptions in the market as is happening right now. Now, the idea that Venezuelan oil is going to flood the crude oil market and crash prices starting next week is just plain silly. The first thing that happened last week was people jumped to that conclusion thinking, "Okay, President Trump just took all the oil from Venezuela. He's going to, you know, send the oil companies in. They're going to start producing oil next month and uh it's going to just flood the market." Our friend Dr. Anna Alhaji took a very careful look at this. He did a about an hourong presentation on it on uh Twitter spaces that is uh recorded and available. I strongly encourage anyone interested in the oil market to listen to that full interview with Dr. Anna Alhaji. That's linked in your research roundup email. But what he said is to bring just 1 million barrels of additional Venezuelan production back online will take at least 3 years. So that's good news for the coming energy crisis, but it doesn't affect the 2026 outlook for oil prices at all, save for some repositioning overshoots as we're seeing right now. So, by 9:00 a.m. on Tuesday, we were back up to the 50-day moving average resistance line. Looked like the market was about to break out higher because the cooler heads, the more knowledgeable oil traders were correctly understanding that, you know, we're not going to flood the market next week or next month with Venezuelan oil. That's a story that's years down the road, not weeks down the road. Then came President Trump's announcement that Venezuela would immediately turn over 30 to 50 million barrels of oil. Wow, that's a lot of oil. Well, actually, when you consider that we generally measure in millions of barrels per day of oil production, 30 to 50 million barrels one-time shot is not as much as it sounds like, first of all. But the question to ask then was after President Trump said Venezuela is going to be turning over 30 to 50 million barrels of oil immediately. Question everybody should have asked is oh well that's interesting. Does Venezuela actually have 30 to 50 million barrels of oil that they could turn over even if that was what was agreed to? That perception though that they were suddenly going to flood the market with that oil brought us back to the oh boy it's going to crash prices and that led to more investor sentimentd driven selling. The dumb money started selling handoverfist taking WTI crude back down to a 55 handle by Tuesday's close. Just one little detail nobody uh bothered to ask about is do they actually have that oil? No, they don't. Say both Dr. Anna Alhaji and also our other good friend in the oil business Rory Johnston. I reached out to both of them on Twitter and they responded very quickly saying basically no way. Dr. Anna Alhaji says maybe there's 11 to 12 million barrels of floating storage in Venezuela maximum. Uh there may also be some landbased storage, but even if they had the maximum number that anybody thinks, which is maybe 15 million barrels, that gets you to 20 to 25 million barrels total, every drop of uh oil that they might have. So turning over 50 million barrels next week or whatever the the president announced ain't going to happen. It's still more importantly even if it did happen that 50 million barrels would you know only really change the market for a matter of weeks before it was absorbed into the market it's still going to take 3 years or more per Dr. Alhaji in order to bring another million barrels a day of Venezuelan production online and it's going to take lots of investment in order for that to happen. Now, it does seem like the Trump administration is poised to potentially subsidize that investment and make it happen quickly. Uh, but there's also the question of whether he will face political and court opposition to his efforts to do so. Now to be clear, I personally can eventually see a very plausible scenario where if this is allowed to continue, it could eventually lead to the point where Venezuela really does become a gamecher in the coming energy crisis that I have predicted. Perhaps supplying as much as 5 million barrels a day of exports after being fully developed. What does that mean? That means that story will play out in the mid 2030s. long after Trump is out of office and probably not on the scale that I just described of 5 million barrels a day until after the 2032 elections, two more election cycles from now. So, this is a long-term story. If we were to really get all of Venezuela, which is the largest oil reserves, even bigger than uh Saudi Arabia in the world, it would take a decade and massive, you know, tens if not hundreds of billions of dollars of investment in order to get that really happening. Our producers are already working to get both Rory Johnston and Dr. Anna Alhaji back on the show in coming weeks. We'll get you more perspective on this oil market as this story develops. Well, Eric, first off, we have to highlight that crude oil technically remains in a very clear downtrend. It's uh repetitively making lower highs and failing at the 50-day moving average. Uh when you can basically connect a descending trend line along all those highs to depict that downtrend. Now, what we are seeing though is negative news and crude oil really isn't selling off hard on negative news and it's certainly not making lower lows. And to me, if we see a scenario where there's bad news and crude oil stops breaking down on that bad news, um then that means that we found a new fair value zone for crude and it could be a trading bottom that it is established. is incredibly premature to make a bull call here. But one of the things to solve here in the first month of the year is uh are we seeing a basing formation developing on crude or does the prevailing downtrend still take it to the next level down? Overall, it would take a legitimate breakout above the $60 level to bullishly turn this trend up. And that's still just so far away. And so there's going to need to be some real momentum shift for the bulls to even have a shot here. All right, Erica, let's talk about these precious metals. What's going on here in gold? The sharp correction in the last few days of the year was easy to see coming. And hey, we warned you about it several times here on Macrovoices. So hopefully none of our listeners got hurt in that move. I added 10% to my longs on the retest of the breakout region at 2370 and then I added another 15% at 2300 even. So, I'm now up 25% on my position size after buying this dip in size. The correction cleared out the extreme overbought stochastics. As much as the fundamentals were strong, as I've been warning for weeks, we were flashing extreme overbought on those short-term technical stoastics oscillators that now we've gone all the way back down, at least on the slow stochastics and almost all the way there on the RSI to an oversold condition on the short-term chart. That clears the way for a substantive move higher. And I'm convinced that the medium to long-term fundamentals are still super bullish. The Trump administration isn't about to back away from its bold policy initiatives, and that only strengthens the argument for central banks to continue to diversify out of treasuries into more gold. But there is a short-term risk on the near horizon. So, this correction that we've just seen might not necessarily be over yet. It could be that the uh final low is still to come. And believe me, if it gets down to 4,200, I'll be buying more. What's on the horizon is this. The Bloomberg commodity index is going to be rebalancing the the it's a scheduled event January 9th through 15th. Basically, what's happening is that commodity index because gold has performed so well. It's creating forced selling for the various funds that track the BCOM index. They have to sell. It's not a discretionary thing. They have to sell and they have to sell between the 9th and the 15th of January. So the correction that we just saw could have been front runners anticipating that move and you never know how these scheduled things are going to play out. It's obvious, you know, to think, oh well that means if they're going to sell, it's going to force the price down. But of course, people saw that coming. They were front running it. They game it. And sometimes it actually ends up doing the opposite of what you thought when the actual uh event happens. So we'll see how this plays out. But if we do get down to a new low, uh, an undercut low, and especially if it gets down as low as 4,200, I'll be adding even more to my longs, uh, closer to the 15th of January when that forced selling should wind down because I'm convinced that we are setting the stage here for the next major leg higher, targeting somewhere between 4,900 and 5,100 over the next several months. But again, that risk between now and January 15th is for potentially some turbulence in the market. Well, Eric, there's a very clean bull trend in gold. Uh, still very well underway. Old dips keeping being bought. Even that one big down day that we had uh was uh very quickly bought on dip and gold pushed right back to its previous high. So, we're in a situation where there's just no argument that the bulls remain in control of this trend. The bigger question is is that are we going to see the other precious metals uh come under some selling pressure and does that take a little bit of the steam out of this huge bull momentum that we're seeing or is this thing going to just keep plugging away? Uh overall there are measured moves up to 4,900 even 5,000 on the upside. Uh, and so if we can get that breakout to a 52- week high, then uh there's no reason why we can't tack on $300 more an ounce in the first quarter of the year. All right, Eric, let's touch on uranium and uranium stocks here. Well, Patrick, the uranium miners mostly closed up and near their intraday highs on Wednesday, even as the S&P was modestly down on the day. And that's yet another sign that this market is heating up and we're seeing uranium and uranium equities breaking away from mainstream stock market and really accelerating what I think is a very strong bull market that's been in a technical correction since the 15th of October. Looks like that's finally ending and we're maybe about to break substantially higher. Let's see how that plays out. We're seeing more and more bullish fundamentals with announcements from uh energy secretary Chris Wright almost daily now coming out as he continues to talk up the formative nuclear renaissance. The strong case for increasing America's enrichment capability which will increase demand. One of the cautions that I've described in the past for this uranium bull market is, hey, you only got a certain amount of demand that's possible based on the amount of enrichment capacity that we have, and Russia controls a lot of it. By the way, well, as we're now aggressively building out more uranium uh enrichment capacity, it just speaks of more demand coming for uranium in coming years. A few names like NextGen Energy have already broken out well above their October 15th highs when this technical correction started. Others like Dennis Mines are almost there. The ETFs are lagging behind particularly the URA ETF which has quite a few uh small modular reactor names like Oaklo and new scale in their portfolio. Those are not performing as well as the uranium stocks have been in the last couple of weeks. That's the reason URRA is kind of the lagard there. but it has already broken out of its symmetrical triangle pattern to the upside. That ETF is particularly important because a lot of the institutional money follows that one. It's where it's the one that has the most liquidity and it also has the only liquid enough options chain to support options trading on uh the underlying uranium in investments in size. So, URRA is a very important name in this market and it is uh already starting to break out catching up to some of its pure uranium play peers which are already much higher. So, all signs are bullish. The one big risk still on the table is the unwind of the AI trade that would clobber all things including uh uranium stocks or all things nuclear including uranium stocks. The bull thesis for uranium itself does not in any way, shape or form rely on AI. But, you know, that's not how markets work. If AI unwinds, so will the uranium miners just because of basketing of the uranium miners into AI trading baskets and it will be a big buy the dip opportunity if it should happen. Well, I agree with your views there, Eric. We certainly saw a technical turnup in uranium and so it'll be very interesting to see whether the bulls can follow through because you can see that uh certainly a few of these individual names are really pressing while the URRA ATF continues to drag a little bit. But when we're looking at uranium itself, this kind of 80 to $85 has been a substantial resistance point for the entire fourth quarter of the year. And so the question here is will we see the underlying commodity start the year with a breakout to a higher high that could certainly add some bullish tailwind to the whole story throughout the first quarter. Now I also wanted to just touch on the copper chart here on page 11. And we saw a breakout to a fresh new high clearing that tariff pop that we had back in July. Seeing the $6 handle finally hit. We're uh in a very clear bull market on copper, but the question is is that uh is the this move already a little bit overextended. Certainly some of the upside targets uh for a bull continuation could see 640 650 hit on the upside. Let's see whether the copper bulls can keep this going. Patrick, before we wrap up this week's show, let's hit that 10-year Treasury note chart. Yeah. So, the 10-year Treasury yield has been in a purgatory limbo uh for the entire month of December and rightfully so. Things got quiet and uh there is a lot of data that is needed for the uh Fed to know whether to pivot on their policy path. So, at this juncture, the first news will be the jobs numbers here on Friday. And now, will it be an outlier number or is it just going to come in line? It certainly is the first trigger point that could get things uh moving again here. Uh whether or not we're going to get a breakout above the 420 level or whether we're back under that 50-day moving average could be decided early next week. 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