Stocks To Crash By 50%+, Silver To Surge To $300+? | Michael Oliver

So I think we have a major asset category shift underway here, a topping process in the stock market. In fact, the biggest stock market bubble we've ever had in terms of duration and dimension from 2009 to the present. There's no bull market in U.S. history that matches that. Even 29 top didn't match it, dot com, et cetera, et cetera. So we have a bubble there, but we have a deflated bubble in the commodities that wants to reassert itself. and their technicals tell us it's going to do it. And I think that's a place for investors to look. And it will be in part a consequence of the breakage of the stock market because the stock market breakage will cause movement of assets out of a broken category into that which is perceived to be low risk, higher reward, commodity category. Welcome to Thoughtful Money. I'm its founder and your host, Adam Taggart. The S&P 500 clocked its best month in six years in April. Is that momentum likely to continue? And will the volatility in many commodities due to the closure of the Persian Gulf likely become more extreme the longer this war extends? What about bonds? Will the start of the Kevin Warsh era at the Federal Reserve bring any relief to yields? To address these pressing questions, we're fortunate to welcome back to the program technical analyst and author Michael Oliver, founder of market research firm Momentum Structural Analysis. Michael, thanks so much for joining us today. Good to be back, Adam. Great to have you back, Michael. So last time we talked, I believe, was at the Thoughtful Money Spring Conference two months ago. You made, as you normally do, made a number of pretty bold statements about where you see different asset classes headed. I want to see if anything's changed since we talked two months ago. Probably going to use the framework for this discussion, your recent report that you just put out, Momentum Structural Analysis, recent report you put out this weekend. And I'll bring up some of the charts in just a second. But why don't I start with this? As I mentioned, the S&P just had its best month in a number of years. Do you trust this rally? Are we in a new bull uptrend from here, or do you look at it with a little bit more skepticism? Here's our view. It's been our view for a while. We think the stock market in the U.S. has been in a topping process for a year since early last year. The problem is that when you go back and look at the tops in the S&P, like 2000 dot com top, 2007 mortgage crisis top, it's laborious. It's not like, oh, that's it. It's all over in a spike and you collapse. No, it doesn't happen that way. uh it's in fact our momentum work in each of those two prior cases said it's topping before it actually made its final spike high in the process so it was laborious but the momentum indicated early enough that oh this this guy's running out of gas he's floundering and in each case there was this final like spike oh boy you know what damn great you know new high uh um back several months ago if you look at an s&p chart you don't have to right now but if any of your watchers i'll pull it up here like a monthly s&p chart that's on the right side there here's the monthly yeah that's it look at those are monthly bars going back to 2021 2020 i think but anyway look at the cluster of bars that just occurred prior to the recent upside spike the last four or five monthly bars go up the other sideways one two three four five six months and then you had a little plunge there by the war news of course uh that sort of nipped out the low of that cluster of action and spooked a lot of people the problem was and we argued then that even though the market's in a topping process it needs to rally one more time And there were technical reasons for this. Plus, on the other hand, the other reason was you don't top a market with a transient headline. The reasons for market tops are usually far more embedded in the fundamentals of the market than simply, oh, a new headline. Oh, golly. If you go back to last year, for example, we had that drop due to the news of tariffs. In fact, tariffs would not even own anybody's lexicon until Trump became president and mentioned tariffs. And then suddenly the market panicked on a headline. There are far bigger reasons for the stock market to top than a temporary headline. In fact, tariffs have not gone away and yet the market moved to a new high. OK, so remember that when you trade off of headlines. The guy who shorted that market back last year got spiked very rapidly in April when Trump said, oh, 90 day pause and then right back up. Same thing this time. We had the drop due to the Iran thing. And without a change in that. No positive development. It's markets at us. Heck with that. I'm going back up anyway. OK. And surprise people. It did not surprise us because our more closer up technicals argued. Nope, you got to have that one more rally. And we had it. Thank you. The new highs we just saw, I think, are transient. I think we thought that it would occur and we thought that probably it would extend into this month. And I suspect you may even make higher highs this month than you did last. But what I'd be very careful of this time is that if you start to stall this rally, and you won't see it on this chart, but you know, the day-to-day action, you start to wobble off during the middle of the quarter and then soften by the end of the quarter, not collapse, no big sharp drop, just ooze on back down under that 7,000 level by much, and you'll be in a very precarious position. Now, here's one example of it. The chart below that S&P price chart is a monthly chart of the S&P plotted in its relation to its 36-month average. That's overlaid on the price chart as a red line, but the chart below oscillates those bars, monthly price bars, in their relationship to where the 36-month average is, that effectively a smooth three-year average. You'll notice that since the 2022 low, S&P then was about $3,500 in price. The momentum of the spread got down around the zero line, meaning around the 36-month average in based, and you were in an upward tube. Lovely channel. You broke that channel in recent months and fell down to the red line that we had already plotted before that low occurred, by the way. We'd already plotted that red line, and we had enough of a rally late in March to pop back up to close right on that line. It was April. Yeah, March. Yeah. And then April shot up off of it. Now, what that means is if you're merely looking at the momentum chart, which is our prime focus, momentum will usually lead in transitions of tops or bottoms. It'll usually lead price, but you don't see it on the price chart, but you see it on the momentum. This is clearly a topping situation. You've already broken your channel. You've now developed almost a flat floor there by the red line three times, bang, bang, bang. You now have what we call a structure. You close below that structure and as far as we're concerned, that's it. It's over. You are headed down this time for real. It doesn't have to crash, but it will begin the downside. And those numbers are not very far below the market. They're like in the 6,600 level on the S&P, which is sort of, if you go back to the price chart, you know, 66.83 in next month, excuse me, in this month, or by June, 67.85 will break that. You can see the red circles. In other words, if you pull price back into those red circles on price, you're going to be blowing out that momentum structure. Similar things going on with NASDAQ. We don't have to discuss it in detail, but it's got the almost exact same situation, the NASDAQ 100, where it's got this flat red line structure. You've already blown your parallel channel that you lived in for several years on the upside of momentum. So momentum's already deteriorating. And you'll notice now that we're making a new price high. Look at the momentum chart, not making a new high. Okay. So you got to watch these two beasts because they roll over those red lines and we've got a bear market. All right. And Michael, just real quick. So the momentum in both the NASDAQ and the S&P has broken down out of this channel it's been in since mid-2022. Yeah. So are you expecting that the channel, if I were to extend your dotted line? It could be that it fails around there. That last downtick you see is simply Friday's close. It was only one day in May so far. So we don't know where that monthly close will be. But the main point we've got is that the red lines on both charts are screaming at us. And those numbers come up so much that they don't even require month by month. They adjust up with the 36 month average in the distance. That's about 20 percent over is where you break that NASDAQ thing. You get about 20 percent over that rising 36 month average. You blow that multi-year structure. And in that case, if you were looking just at that chart instead of the price chart, you'd say, oops. something's wrong here. Okay. Momentum almost always behaves like this before price indicates, oops, I've made a mistake. I'm headed down. Yeah. And Michael, you mentioned that topping processes generally end with sort of a last spike, right? And quite often the case, especially when you had headlines that caused the sell-off. Got it. Okay. And is your current default assumption that in both the NASDAQ and the S&P, we are in the process of that final spike? We'll see it. We'll see it as it develops. We look at lesser long-term metrics than annual momentum. We look at quarterly momentum and monthly and weekly, even getting out of the daily. So we're looking at it constantly to assess rollover. And as it happens, these annual momentum charts are in very tight agreement with quarterly momentum. That's when we measure price versus a three-quarter average, as opposed to like a three-year average in this case. So we have the structures developed to blow this bridge up, okay, to the downside. And it looks like they're behaving as is typical at a topping process. And the problem was that you don't enter markets based on headlines that are surprises. Because usually, even if you're in the right trend, like for example, oil. We turned bullish on oil back in January based on long-term momentum. Price of oil then was $65 West Texas Intermediate. Then you'll go up some more in February. Then came the news, okay? And it drove oil up to $117 at one point, okay? But momentum already said it's valid to go up now you're in a fresh bull trend the problem was the headline exacerbated the normalities of the up move it got ahead of itself so it wouldn't shock us that in the case of oil for example the guys who bought the headlines get gut kicked meaning if you bought it 110 or 105 or something don't be shocked if you see 80 again or 85 or something they gut kick you who bought late instead of buying in January when we said you bought on the headline news. Similar upside down here with the situation with the S&P. Yes, it's got technicals to justify a topping process, but you're not going to top with a headline that is transient. There are far bigger reasons for this market to go down. And we're dealing with one right now in the bond market is a major reason. Okay. And we're going to get there in just a little bit. Let me ask you this, Michael. So let's assume for a moment that S&P, NASDAQ price declines to hit those red circles, which basically breaks the momentum trends and the momentum charts. What does that open up then, in your opinion? Multi-year bear trend. Sorry, multi-year bear trend? Yeah, but the question is, what goes with it? What other assets go with it? How much down will it go? I don't know that. I can say that most of the bear markets in U.S. history of the last 100 years last two and a half to three years. The dimension of the decline varies. Usually they're at least 50%. In some cases, they're 80. Near full wipeout. Dot-com top for NASDAQ 100. NASDAQ 100 dropped 82% by 2002. S&P dropped 50. Dow in 1929 to 32. It was about an 80% drop ultimately. uh etc etc um so i don't know the answer to that question but because of certain other factors i think that the decline here will be associated with other technicals and fundamentals in other markets that are very painful to the average guy even people who aren't in the stock market uh and anyway okay and what would be a manifestation of that is that high oil prices is that well i I think the one asset category that is going to appreciate over the next couple of years, and it's really not too late to participate in, those who are chasing gold and silver now, they have problems. The guy who bought silver at $110 in January, he suffered. He didn't buy it at the right. He should have bought it in the 50s and the 30s, what we said. But in the case of commodities, the Bloomberg Commodity Index, for example, which is a broad, fairly well-balanced index, is now trading at 140, which is, for price, it's back to the high it made in 2022. That's when that war began, Ukraine-Russia war. At that point, the commodity index topped at the war event, topped three weeks after that war commenced. in March. War started in February of 2022. Everything went down after that. And the Bloomberg went down under a hundred in price. Its prior low had been in the fifties. Now think about this for a minute. A broad commodity asset category trading in the fifties, but in 2008, it was trading at 237. Okay. So is that a cheap asset category or not? Okay. Now either we don't need commodities anymore. We're going ethereal, okay? Or we still need them when we made a mistake, okay? Most commodity components within the Bloomberg have turned up on our annual momentum. The Bloomberg, in fact, turned up last October. Price then was $106.50. It's since surged up to $140 and actually taken out the high that was seen in March of 2022. But most of that move occurred before oil even woke up. Again, oil broke out in January at 65. Heck, the Bloomberg broke out in October on momentum. The Bloomberg was already well up in 110, 120 before the war even occurred in March, meaning the excuse for the Bloomberg going up was not simply oil. It was a lot of the underlying components, base metals, grains, etc. So I think we have a major asset category shift underway here, a topping process in the stock market. In fact, the biggest stock market bubble we've ever had in terms of duration and dimension from 2009 to the present. There's no bull market in U.S. history that matches that. Even 29 top didn't match it, dot com, etc., etc. So we have a bubble there, but we have a deflated bubble in the commodities that wants to reassert itself. and our technicals tell us it's going to do it. Many subcomponents within it are going to do it, not just gold and silver, which already has long been underway. And I think that's a place for investors to look. And it will be in part a consequence of the breakage of the stock market because the stock market breakage will cause movement of assets out of a broken category into that which is perceived to be low risk, higher reward commodity category. Okay. So you see this as sort of a massive secular capital rotation, right? Out of the bubblicious stock market. You're probably also going to say out of bonds, and I'll give you a chance to explain why in a bit. But that's going to, all that money is not just going to vaporize, a lot of it's going to go into commodities. That's right. It never in no case in the stock market history do you get all markets going down at once In other words during the 2000 to 2002 bear market stocks gold advanced It wasn't major, but it was advancing from a low during that whole time. Okay. 2007 to 2009. Yes, there was a very bad month for gold in October of 2008. But all during that time, gold was advancing while the stock market was going down. Okay. And this is true through history. Money goes somewhere else. And I know the central bank will call this, quote, inflation, which is falsehood. Inflation is the growth in the money supply. Punch up an M2 chart and there's your chart of inflation. It is ongoing. The only issue is whether it's going faster or less fast. Okay. And that's why when your granddad built a house, it cost him $4,500, your father $45,000. And if you want a median home, it's $4,450,000 because of money decay. It's inflation. So, but the Fed likes to look at CPI and say, well, that's inflation. No, it's not. It's merely reflection of where that money goes. they don't mind it when it goes in the stock market they don't regard that as inflation okay right uh in fact if you look at an s&p since the year 2000.com top to the present figure it's multiple gain and go to an m2 chart they're almost an overlay same multiple gain since 2000 that's that gets cheered but if the same thing happens with the price of gas everybody or corn they don't care about corn farmers or oil producers yeah they can go down. But the money will move to simply a different asset category. Okay. And so this is, just to make sure I understand you understood your comment earlier, you were talking about the risk of a multi-year bear market. And you said that's going to manifest in ways that'll hurt the average guy, even if he's not invested in the market. And by that, I assume you mean he's going to see the cost of living go up basically because of his increase in commodity prices. He'll probably also see the cost of living go up because the cost of borrowing will also be going up too. And again, I'll give you a chance to talk about that. And he might lose a job or his wife might lose a job or he may be retired and have to go back to work. Or if he does have a 401k, that's going to be hurt as well with the popping of the stock bubble, right? That's the only thing he's smiling at right now is his 401k. Right. Right now. Yeah, right now. But that could go away quickly. And if you take 20% haircut off that or 25 or 30, then suddenly the guy's panicked like, gosh, nothing's working. And then it also means a lot of political disarray. We're already seeing that anyway, in terms of partisan fragmentation. We were all happy with one way and then happy with another, and now we're not happy with either. And you get the point. It's a sense of when you don't know where you're going, you get panicked. And that's what's about to happen. And that's a great point, not that either of us are political analysts, but I've been hearing recently in the media that President Trump's disapproval rating is at certainly a record high for this second administration. But at the same time, while his poll numbers are getting worse, the poll numbers for Democrats are getting even worse. Right. So people are. It's not that they're moving from one side to the other. Yeah, that's right. Yeah. It's it's like hands in the air. I don't know what to do. You know, what other choice? It was a similar decision made in Argentina over a year ago. you know two established parties the dysfunctional country headed into a depression uh two parties back and forth for decades you still ended up with a quagmire used to be the seventh strongest economy in the world and it became effectively a third world economy and javier malay comes in and starts to dismantle it but but it required hands up in the air type of well we don't need any of that old stuff anymore we need something new and i'm not going to discuss that issue, but it's the kind of environment that creates that sort of political change. Yes. And this is classic fourth turning, if you're familiar with Neil Howe's work. And folks watching, I probably should get Neil back on soon. So I'll make a note to do that. Okay. So, all right. So stock market, while there's a short-term party going on, you're very distrustful of it. And you're looking to see if it actually breaks those key momentum levels. If it does, you think it's game on for, you don't know how long it's going to be, right? You don't know how long or how deep, but given history, you are prepared for a multi-year, pretty painful market correction. Especially given the bubble that we're breaking down from. Which you're saying is the worst ever. Yeah, we know this silver is doing the opposite of this. it's going from excessively low to a new reality. But we've seen anybody in markets knows when a market does something excessive, like goes too high for too long, like the dot-com bubble, even though it was based on truths, the internet did change our life. Okay, more so than the dot-com guys believed. Yet NASDAQ 100 dropped 82%. Yeah. So. Okay. All right. And you just gave a little teaser there about silver. I promise folks, I'm going to let Michael expound on that. Okay. Let's get there via a different asset class first. I'm going to breeze by your charts here, Michael, on Microsoft and Apple. But you're basically saying you're starting to see some of the weakness that you might expect in those all-important bellwethers. Yeah, momentum. We're looking for momentum structures there that echo the pending momentum breakdown structures we see in the indexes. And if you could find two or three major, too big to fail stocks, not that they're going to fail, but they go to a bear trend. You can't weather that. You can't have an Apple and a Microsoft break into a bear trend and have the market go up. It's not going to happen. Okay. Right. And Microsoft is already. Well, Microsoft's already done its initial damage. Yeah. Any rally now is on price. You can see the price chart. It's bouncing off a horizontal line. Any idiot with a crayon could have drawn that. Okay. Yeah. So that's why they bought it recently. In fact, I bought it on a trade there. I sold it already. Okay. But when I look at the annual momentum, it's already fractured. Okay. This rally is a rally in a new downtrend. Okay. For momentum. Apple has not broken yet, but it's not far away in terms of momentum breakage. The red circle on both charts indicates where that occurs. anyway. Okay. So I don't want to spend too much time on this. This evidence is sort of validative of what you would expect to be seeing with the loss of momentum in the big indices. And of course, these make up huge chunks of the market value of those indices. Okay. So now we're getting over here into debt. And you have here US's long-dated debt, dot, dot, dot, crisis near. But the key takeaway I took from this was just that you expect yields to continue to march higher from here, correct? Yes. We see price, which is of course upside down versus yields. Okay. Look at T-Bond price going back to 2009 each month, monthly bar chart to 2009. And in 2020, as it came down to, it got up to 192. Okay. Yields were very low. Okay. It dropped and it went into a cluster of ink, either side of 180. We got major bearish there based on momentum. Okay. what followed over the next year or two was a huge collapse ultimately got down to 117 and a half at the red arrow that's when the crash event sort of ended the huge spike in yields okay this is the end of the market the fed doesn't control they may manipulate the 90 day stuff and you know all that but they don't control the long end of the market and this is painful to them okay because it ain't given any relief. Instead, price has tried to bottom there, you can see, for several years. Multiple rallies, but they can't seem to get off the mat. You know, a normal market, you get overdone, you build a base, you turn up. Well, this guy's had three plus years of efforts. Now scroll down to the charts below, and this shows weekly action since that collapse month back in October 2022. The red arrow on both charts shows that low, 117 and a half. And you can see that the weekly action has gone sideways effectively since 2022. Up and down, up and down, anemic. Now, back in November, according to Williams, head of the New York Fed, the Fed was going to start buying bonds. Now, anyway, the chart below that weekly price chart is a 40-week average oscillator. What does that mean? It means we oscillate the price, weekly bar chart price, in its relationship to the 40-week moving average, which is overlaid on the price chart. You go above it, go below it, go above it, below it. It's like noise. But when you plot it on a momentum chart, it developed a four-point uptrend line structure. Perfect trend line. When you see the momentum chart, you don't even have to be a genius to plot the line. Okay. You broke that a few months ago, dropped, rallied back, bumped your head on it, and now you're rolling back over. In fact, you're lower than what you show right there now because we've dropped a little lower. No big deal. But you've broken the integrity of the momentum uptrend effort of the past three years. So all these rallies we've seen in price that didn't go anywhere produced this upward wave structure on momentum. If you look at a price chart, you could be neutral. You say, well, it just goes up and down, right? OK, it's near the lower end. I think I'll buy it. Right. You better. I don't think it's going to hold. We didn't think it would hold. This structure is now broken. It tells us, OK, expect an attack on the lower end of that price range, meaning yields go to new highs. Now, we know this is going to panic the Fed. We know they're already concerned about it. Williams wouldn't have said that back in November. Jamie Diamond earlier, last week sometime, midweek, said, we're headed into a bond, T-bond crisis. And we're going to have to deal with it. He didn't say sometime in the future. He meant we're headed for it now. And our technical work indicates he's dead right. That we're headed for it now. Now, since that chart, we've dropped down to 112 area. You get down around 111 in price, which is that upper chart there. You can see it's probed down to 107.50 back in 2023, but then there were two lows down just in the 111s since then. It almost got to 110. You go back down to the 111 again, you're not going to hold, okay? And I think you could get a mini panic. Now, right now, when you turn on a financial TV channel, you hear chatter about ai and earnings and oh the iran thing you don't hear a headline about the government bond market and we know what's going on in japan they're having a bond crisis the new prime ministry you know a year ago said we're going to print print print to save our bonds okay so we have a major country in the alliance you know the western alliance even though it's Japan, with a bond crisis. Now, we're on the edge of one. We know the UK is near one. You get the point? This is a big issue. This is far bigger than mortgage crisis. Okay. So for you, how does this manifest? One, what do you think yields could go up to? And then also, this one's a little trickier because if there's an asset class, the US government's going to try to step in and yeah oh yeah being with uh it's going to be this one so are you expecting this to kind of be a runaway issue or will they step in and cap it okay think about it as a portfolio manager you know there used to be the rule 60 40 stocks bonds okay and they think if you had the 40 bonds you'd be have a balanced portfolio well to some extent if you go back and look at the bear markets 2000 2002 2007 and 9 bonds actually worked out they actually went up in price, down in yields with gold. Gold was the better alternative, but they were alternatives. Right now, bonds aren't an alternative. They're acting like they're going to lead the puke. This is Jim Grant's return-free risk? Yeah. And there was the CIO of Morgan Stanley several months ago said, yeah, you need to put 20% gold in there and reduce your bonds to 20%, a new reality. Well, he was very honest in admitting that. It might have been a little low on his percentages, but still, he was effectively saying the old reality is changing. Bonds are no longer the alternative. Well, what does that leave you with? It's never the case that all assets go down. Okay? If you run out of stocks because you're scared and you're getting hurt, and the bonds aren't acting well, what do you do? Well, I think you go down here, right? Yeah, you go there and you buy the gold pullback. Now, gold, this doesn't show the long-term trend. It just shows the daily action since late last year. And what we're looking for on gold and silver right now and the miners are metrics that are shorter term than what we just looked at on the stock market and bonds. Why? Because frankly, the long-term trend metrics of gold and silver are in no manner near or even close to jeopardy. The sharp drop we just saw doesn't even put them in jeopardy when you look at long-term momentum of those markets. It's just a downtick. Okay. Okay. So just, sorry, stepping in, but a lot of people here are invested in the precious metals. Yeah. A lot of them were in before the big price run. Some other ones jumped in at much higher prices. They've all been kind of biting their nails for the most part since mid-January because, all right, they've gone through pretty material corrections, silver especially. I hear you saying, I'm not worried at all. No, I'm not. What we're looking for, first off, if you look at a monthly chart of gold, you don't see it here. The collapse occurred really one day. The last day of January was the huge collapse you see on that daily bar chart. Look where it was then. okay you're trading right around there now go go to the left go to the big collapse day there look at that close it was about 40 4700 the next day in early february got down to 4400 okay yep that was your first low it was basically a two day sell-off okay there's been 65 trading days counting from that january 31st collapse day we've had 65 days of up down up and you can draw lines sideways basically from that January collapse and you've been on either side of it. Yep. Same is true with silver. Okay. So who's winning? Well, it depends on what week you look at. Okay. Unless you shorted at 5,400, 5,600, 5,500 gold and you shorted instead at 4,800, well, you've been kissing your sister for two to three months now. It's been on above and below, above and below. So we regard this as a violent congestion zone. And we like what happened in March. What happened in March, that late March sell-off, was a cleansing break, we think. And before it happened, a week prior to it happening, we suggested that it would likely happen, that we would go down in gold and silver and nip out that February price low. That February low was $44.20 something on gold. And when you collapsed in March, again, with war news, okay, as a motivation, primarily, it took it out for all of about a day and exploded well back above it, 4,200 level. So in other words, it ran the stops, so to speak. So anybody who said, well, I don't want it to go through the Feb Low, it's all over then. Well, okay, you put your stop there, you're stopped out. What's happened since? You've lived mostly above it. Same with silver. It had a low in the 66 level. It got down to 61, I think, in March. Where are we trading now? 74. You know, it's violent congestion, mostly lateral. I think that what we're looking for here, silver daily showing the same thing. Look where we are as of Friday. We're down a bit today, yes. But you're back above, that's gold daily. and silver daily silver is friday you can see the close there was an update we're down today a couple bucks but we're still back above that february low and if you draw a line through most of those low closes that occurred in february down in the 70s what you're just sitting there been above it been below it when we look at our momentum charts and this is just one example you can see that on the 50-day momentum you had a downtrend fairly steep where you broke out of that right after you made that March cleansing low in price, where you swept the Feb low in price, momentum made a low and broke out above that multipoint trend line and rallied up to back above the 50 above the zero line and since gently pull back you close above that red line and close above the high close on that oscillator that occurred a few weeks ago And we regard this as a fully shifted intermediate trend situation Gold has a similar situation okay so we're sober that's what 80 yeah let me put it this way yeah instead of getting specific because the numbers change every day why just look at a 50-day average and it's declining right now okay it requires not only getting back above that average but getting above the close that peaked above it several weeks ago when you clear that this momentum pattern goes into a full positive zigzag meaning okay i'm back okay i cleansed the low of february to no avail i built structure and now i'm headed back up we think getting back over 80 again and silver is a table pounder okay got it you know so silver it's about 10 gold are we talking gold get up you get you get above 4 800 again and i'd say you know wipe your brow if you've been panicked and assume. Now, the numbers will change and we deal with that in our report. So I can't give you the numbers because they literally change week by week, day by day. And we're looking at different metrics other than this. But basically, you don't have to get back up to 100 on silver to convince us. Got it. You get back above 80, you get gold back over 4,800. And you see those two things. And broadly speaking, we have enough momentum metrics to click back to positive, intermediate type metrics, not long term. Long term has never been broken that say, okay, game back on again. And we think what is on the other side of this violent congestion zone is an even more dramatic upside than what we saw in silver from late last year. Like, you know, you go back to last summer, it was 45 bucks. Okay. You know, you tripled. And right now you're trade almost a double that, you know, not quite. It's only been a year and a bit, not even, excuse me, not even a full year. And you come out of this congestion to the upside. And I think what's on the other side of this congestion zone will take silver to three to $500. Okay. So just for scale, folks, looking at the price chart here, here we're at about 82 to 300 bucks would be up about here. Yeah, three to five hundred is right. Three to five hundred. I got to be open higher. Okay, so we're up here. There are long-term reasons for that assumption. There are also fundamental reasons. There are monetary reasons. We've got like umpteen reasons and archival examples of markets doing the same. And basically, in broad strokes, silver was vastly underpriced for too long. And when something gets overpriced or underpriced, when it corrects the other way, it usually overdoes it. Okay. Yeah. So, Michael, you and I, this was back in, I can't remember the exact date, but it was, it was, we recorded, I think, on the day before silver had its big puke moment. And this is before the war. And you had made a very bold statement of saying, hey, wouldn't surprise you for silver to get to 250, maybe even 300 bucks by this summer. now you didn't know that uh we were about to go to war um and obviously you're you're calling as best you see with the data you have at the moment given where we are now sounds like you still feel comfortable saying oh we're getting there we're getting the 300 maybe even up to 500 and now it's silver um oh are you changing your timing estimate at all given some of the things that have happened i still think it could be like by late summer by this summer sometime in other words i think once you come out of this congestion zone and basically forget the 120 high that was phantom you're barely up there for any time at all right let's call it let's say above 100 much okay most people are then going to wake up and say you know golly it didn't break down it wasn't a top like everybody said i guess i better get back in or you know i'm glad i didn't get out uh i think what's on the other side of that could be done in like three monthly bars, another quarter of upside where you gush to those levels. All right. Well, as a substantial silver holder, I'm going to say from your lips to God's ears, I hope this indeed happens on that type of timeline. Let me ask you this. It's not necessarily causation, although I do think there is some going on, but there seems to be some real correlation right now, inverse correlation between the precious metals and oil prices. And my working hypothesis is that it's not that dissimilar from a margin call with stocks, where when there's a steep and sudden market drop, you get margin calls, you just have to sell whatever has value, right? And we had a little bit of that going on in early March with the markets themselves. But more importantly, I think it's with the price of oil having jumped up as far as it has as quickly as it had at the start of the war, you're kind of having that same effect at the sovereign level, where countries that had been net buyers of gold are now saying, oh, God, we've got to pay for this. I hear some of those headlines of even individuals panicking because their income has dropped and they need to sell their jewelry. Right. Yeah, because gas prices for the individual household have gone up. But so how much of a factor is that in your analysis here? It helps explain the congestion zone, although, as you said, the war didn't start until early March or late February, so we'd already had our major drop by then. I think it's noise. I think it's now the excuse for people to use day to day. And so, as I've argued, when you go back and look at the major bear markets in the stock market, gold was a beneficiary, largely because the central bank, you know, for the past 110 years will pump, pump, pump when that market breaks. Now they have a different problem, far bigger than the government bond market. Right. Right. That is you look at the you see stocks have a bad day. Silver has a gold has a bad day. And you look at bonds and they have a bad day, too. But they don't have a good day when stocks and gold are good days. And so there's this oozing of this giant and he's too big to fail. OK, he's bigger than the stock market. And yet nobody's pounding the table about that headline. Why? Because it's it's built into the system. It's been there for decades. It's just getting worse and worse. So Jamie Dimon has noted before, a year ago, that we're going to have a bond crisis at some point. Now he's more a little more focused in on now. A little more pointed about it. Yeah, yeah. And he's technically right now. And who was it? Sorry to interrupt, but who was it? Hank Paulson basically just came out of retirement to basically give the same warning, right? Oh, really? Well, see, that's what does the Fed do in that situation? I mean, smack yourself in the face and answer the question. OK, they print, print, print. They have to. Otherwise, they let the house burn down. OK, so they have a zero choice. That's what the Japanese are doing. They're printing. OK, and that's what everybody will do when they have to do it, because otherwise they sit back and say, I'm going to let it burn. No, of course not. And by definition, where does the money go? Go. Yeah. By definition, that raises commodity prices. And if that if capital is rotating out of those other assets into commodities, that just gives even more tailwinds. All right. Last question on the oil thing is, I know you were making the technical argument for the potential three months move to several hundred dollars over. To me, a potential catalyst for that could be an end to the war that then opens up the Gulf and unleashes the supply that's stuck there right at the time where all the other oil exporters have been ramping up and there's maybe some demand destruction from these high prices. So all of a sudden, there's just a lot of oil out there and the oil price comes down and that boot that's currently on the neck of gold and silver prices gets removed, right? If that's the boot, pardon me for slightly disagreeing, or is it simply people selling headlines? Sell everything because we're going to have an end of the world type situation here. Well, somehow I don't think it's going to last forever, even if it just remains state versus state. because I think inside, I try to keep up with the Iranian resistance movement. They have a website and everything. And I still have a strong suspicion there would be a very pregnant point where, bam, that becomes a headline again. The only difference this time is when they go into the streets, they're dealing with a government that is having to deal with outside problems, not just the street problems. Right. In which case, the government can implode very rapidly once there's a sense that, oh, gosh, we can't control this this time. And, you know, it could be like a light switch event if you have a domestic uprising. And these people are brave. I mean, they had 30,000 people get killed in January. And, you know, they go into the streets again. This is it could change everything like a headline suddenly. So therefore, the people who shorted silver and gold thinking the world's going into a depression. OK, therefore, everything's going down. Made a mistake. Right. That script flips to, oh, my goodness, the IRGC regime is over. And, you know, we now are going to have a run that's going to normalize with the West. Yeah. You'll still have rising commodity prices going forward. Oil will have a sharp correction. But I guess so. It sounds like, yes, this could be a catalyst for what you're thinking of. But it seems clear to me your prediction in no way depends upon this war ending anytime soon. Like, do you think it's just going to happen for a variety of reasons? Well, I mean, stand back and look at it for a minute, though. Once the war began, it really hasn't gotten better, has it? OK. OK. In fact, most people think it's gotten worse. And yet price didn't continue down. We had a collapse in March to silver to 61. You know, about three weeks after the war began. OK. That was its war low. Where is it now? Way above that low. OK. War hasn't gotten better. Look at the stock market. Same story. The headline is being washed away. If you sold the stock market based on tariffs in Jan, Feb or March of last year, you got killed. You got your face ripped off and something here with the word. Headlines are not a way to invest in markets. Later on, you'll get headlines that validate what has happened. But when they come before, forget it. Right. Well, and that's, I mean, I'm sort of singing your songs from your song sheet, but that's the value. I think you say that technical analysis has, is it lets us see these trends before they're validated by the headlines. Correct. Correct. Okay. So staying on the topic of precious metals just for a moment. So, yes, the metals themselves have gone through a correction. They have stabilized here. You think they've got substantially brighter days ahead. You could sort of say the same thing about the miners from a price action standpoint. And I guess just by force of logic, I'm thinking you think the miners are very well poised here too, correct? Yes. Technically speaking, the miners look to us like the better place to be. Now, there are day-to-day situations where you say, oh, gosh, the miners suck. You know, they just aren't, gold's flat and they're down 2% or something. Right. Or gold's up and they didn't move at all. But if you do a spread relationship, a relative performance relationship of GDX versus gold and go back a couple of years and then plot SIL versus gold, silver miners versus gold. But take XAU or GDX. They have gold silver miners in both, okay? GDX actually has about 20% silver miners within it, even though it's a gold miner ETF. You go back through the years and you look at what's happened the last several years. They beat the pants off of gold on a percentage gain basis. So yeah, there are days here and there where they look like heck. Now look at that chart at the top. This is the price chart of GDX weekly. You see the January high is the lower first high. They collapsed into late January. They went up and made a new high in February, whereas gold wasn't anywhere near its high. So you see that weekly high up there? Yep. That is February. That's a month after the collapse in gold and silver. They weren't making new highs, but the miners were. And then when we came down in March, the same sell-off as you had in the gold miners on the weekly price chart there, It was the March 12th. They took out their February low as well by more than gold and silver did. But again, you know, they exaggerate both ways. Right. Okay. Now you look at the price chart and it's kind of confusing. Is that a top or is that just violent congestion? Okay. I look at the momentum chart below. This is weekly and it is now set a structure. Now what's important for MSA is things we've learned over the decades. when momentum has waves that are clear usually three is all you get if you look at that high on momentum it occurred in january not when the february price high occurred that high reading on there that's the february high price was making a new high then but it wasn't making a new momentum high it was a hint okay yeah but you've had one wave down a rally a second wave down to the deep levels back up and now you're in your third wave of decline when this one turns up it's over so if you turn up from that third wave and you take out that red line we think it's over congestion zone is resolving to the upside and that'll change week by week and this this case it's in week average we have other metrics so there's no sense specifying a number because it's going to change. But we see momentum age here, not freshness to the downside. We see age. Okay. So you see the weakness is kind of being played out pretty much. It played out pretty much. And I think that when you cross that red line on momentum, regardless of where price is at that point, and it doesn't require taking out that price high, the recent high, for example, we think the miners are saying what we're seeing in silver and gold. We're out of here. That's your green light that it's game on, although I would say right now is a good time to be dollar cost averaging in. We don't recommend buying here because we quit on that. Our buy signals for silver and gold started recently in 2024, March, again in June of 2025 for silver. Let me give you an idea what those prices were. $26 in March of 2024. annual moment to buy. In June of 25, at $34.90, second buy signal. Third buy signal was November last year at $56. We offer no more long-term buy signals. If you're not in at those points, it's your responsibility. You're going to have to suffer volatility maybe like you've just done. But basically, that puts our average entry price somewhere in the 40s, the last three major buy signals. Okay. Just to clear it for folks, we're talking. Yeah. So these bi-signals here are not major. They're merely intermediate. Okay. Okay. Yeah. I wanted to make that clear. Okay. Okay. All right. Sorry. Let me just make sure I made the correct statement there. Those numbers you were just giving 26, 34, 50, whatever. Yeah. 56. Yeah. Were those GDX numbers or were those silver? No, those were silver. That's what I thought. Okay. Yeah. That's where our primary focus is because silver has now shifted to outperform versus gold. And let me pass another thought along. Sure. Don't let me be too long-winded here. Silver's taken out both of its prior range highs in the last 50 years. 50 bucks, 50 bucks. Okay. 1980 and 2011. Okay. Blew out all its price highs. But the spread relation between silver and gold is right now. Go back up to the silver chart. It may be there. I'm not sure if I got it there or not. No, it doesn't. Okay. Okay. Yeah. Anyway, silver right now is 1.6% of the price of an ounce of gold. Think about this. When it was 50 bucks back in 1980, it was 6.5% of the price of gold. When it was at 50 bucks in 2011, silver was 3.1% of the price of gold. So while price has blown out those highs massively, the spread is at 1.6. imagine if the spread says hey i want to do what price did i want to go up and challenge or take out the old spread relationship highs i'm going to go up to six and a half percent or i'm going to go above one 3.1 even just going to 3.1 is a doubling of current silver value to gold meaning whatever gold does in the next months silver is likely to do twice as much on the upside percent-wise as gold. Silver's the place to be. Okay. All right. And so with logic, I don't want to put words in your mouth, but it sounds like you're positive on the precious metals in general. So, hey, folks, wait for it to cross those key momentum thresholds that is game on. And gold's going to do well, but silver's going to... The precious metals are going to do well, but the miners are going to do better than the precious metals Silver going to do better than gold So that sort of leads to the logical conclusion that silver miners will do better than the general miner complex Yes If you do a spread relationship or relative performance of GDX, of SIL versus GDX, for example, and we've done this in some recent reports and go back to 2020 when they both made highs. Price, we had a big rally in silver and gold then in 2020. So gold got up to 2000, silver got up to 30 and the miners had had a big move too. Okay, but then the silver miners depreciated more than did the gold miners. So they underperformed. Then for several years, 24, 25, actually late 23, 24 and 25, silver and gold miners were going sideways in relation to each other. In other words, they're holding their same value in relation. That spread broke out late last year, meaning silver miners said, I'm going to beat you gold miners. The spread said so, and they still are. That spread is still gaining silver miners, beating gold miners. So it's the better place to be among the miners. Great. And then I'm just curious if you have an opinion on this. If you're really just going after the potential for the price of silver that's then leveraged by a mining company, do you have an opinion on the royalty and streaming companies versus the actual silver miners themselves? No, no, we go through the miners each month. We have a miner sift report, we call it. And what we try to do is we go through most of the symbols. There are a lot of miners, a heck of a lot. And we rank them in relation, their performance to GDX, for example, which is this miner beating GDX. Like you look at a new mod chart, you think, golly, that's a vertical market. It's not beating GDX, though. It actually, it's stable, but it's not beating it. So we look for outperformers. And some of them will be royalty companies, not many, but in the minors. So it can rotate. And I don't have a subcategorization opinion is what you're asking about. Got it. Okay. It sounds like your approach is just to look at outperformance and track those trends. Each symbol versus the sector, yes. Okay. And again, folks, at the end of this discussion, which is coming up relatively quickly, we'll tell you where you can follow Michael's work and get access to all these charts. All right, Michael. So last asset class that is captured in your recent report, Bitcoin, crypto. I think you also have Ethereum here. So Bitcoin is all that matters. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. If I remember correctly from talking to you in the past, you weren't super bullish on its future. if I'm remembering correctly, but you tell me, what do you think? We got bearish late last year. In fact, well before the top at 128,000, I think it was, 127,000. You can see a cluster of monthly bars there. These are monthly bars of Bitcoin going back to 2020. Big up waves in price and so forth and top charts price. And what we plotted there is a, what we think is a valid price chart structured. A lot of price chart trend lines are meaningless because everybody can see them. You know, if everybody can see the same line, then quite often it's a trap. I mean, you'll break it and it won't go anywhere. But this case, you have a rising pivotal line that was resistance. When you hit the line, you backed off, hit the line, backed off, but it was rising. So it was an ascending line of resistance. And then you broke out above it in 2025 and you pull back and sat on it and no in the first break yeah right there okay sorry up arrow the red up arrow right there no no right there right there you pull back and sat on the line and used it as support validating the line as structurally valid shot up again and then late last year like on october i think it was another yeah no that would have been november you dropped down and held the line again. December. And finally, in January, price broke that line. Okay, now go to momentum below, though. This is why momentum is always better. You had a floor, no subjectivity at all here. They would refuse to close a month or trade much below the zero line, meaning the three-quarter moving average. Three separate times, actually four. over a span of a couple of years. You broke that in November. Now go back to the top chart again. That's two months before that. That's the first drop off the high there. The first sharp drop that held the line. But anyway, we got bearish at a price levels of $110,000 and $102,000 on Bitcoin. And we argued as a first major target that we would go to 60,000. We didn't mean to be so accurate. The low is 60,005. Wow. And since then, we've had this four months now into, since that low, three months of recovery effort. Okay. And we've gotten above 80,000 now today, I think. But you'll look at that black price line. And it wouldn't surprise us that we get up in the low 80,000s. And that's about the best you can do. Because momentum is fully broken. You're not near any upside breakout structure. And it's a fresh major and a fresh major long term breakout. Usually you don't break quarterly momentum and stay down for a couple months. Usually stay down for a couple years. Okay. We suspect this rally is not to be trusted. And we think the next rollover could take you down to levels such that Bitcoin ceases to be a confident area for anybody. Not just technically, but all assumptions about what crypto was could be sidelined by sheer motion. You sort of think of this as it's got decent potential to be kind of the great shakeout for Bitcoin, where it really challenges everybody's thinking. The failed category, the category that didn't turn out to be what they thought it was going to be. Okay. In other words, not the alternative, instead of bubble. Okay. And this will be happening in parallel, you think, from an odd standpoint. I think with the stock market. The stock market bubble puncture. Yes, sure. Okay. Okay. I'm curious, in that case, what do you think that could do to the price of Bitcoin? Are we talking a pretty severe price correction? We don't know. It wouldn't be a correction. It'd be a wipeout. I think you could go down to such levels. If you go back to $30,000 or $40,000, nobody's making money. That's not a bear market. That's a collapse. That's a wipeout. I mean, that means, hey, all your assumptions that were built into this rising effort were false. Yeah, I'm guessing that puts Michael Saylor out of business. Yeah, and there have been some doubters other than me. I'm doing it from a technical point of view. Actually, I kind of like the concept of Bitcoin back in the early days when the futures started trading in late 2017. We've analyzed it ever since. We've called most of the major moves, and we call this one well. But I don't see it ending here. And the problem is if it doesn't end here and you go on down and blow out that 60,000 and go over to Ethereum, EBIT even offers a price level to watch. This is an idiot price chart we're looking at here. See the uptrend on Ethereum going back several years, four or five years. Monthly close, monthly close, monthly close, monthly close, four points along a line. We're now into the third month of rally and we're barely off the mat. if you go take ethereum and close back down around 19 000 again 1900 again you're gonna blow that line out and you can bet the price chart watchers will then suddenly realize oops it ain't working right now they're buying that line because any idiot could draw that line with the crayon you don't have to be a technician to do that and that's what they're buying is that line you don't want to ever slip ethereum back down to the low close and occurred several months ago at 1900 and change. Because then you break that price line, in which case, look at Ethereum's price level. If you break that and go down to, let's say, a thousand again, you want to make the case that this is really a viable alternative asset, monetarily speaking, or not. All right. So this crisis of confidence in the asset class, you think, extends to kind of crypto at large, not just Bitcoin? Oh, yeah. Well, Ethereum, you know, our analysis of Ethereum, we've always said in our reports, we do this every two weeks. We're going to cease the Bitcoin subscription, by the way. We think because the market will include coverage of it, but we won't have a regular Bitcoin subscription. It's going to be just something you'll look back in time and say, well, it lasted for, you know, 10 year phenomenon or so, you know, and it was built all kinds of dreams into place. and assumptions that just didn't turn out to work out fundamentally and technically. What causes the fundamental reassessment is when you get wiped out. Not just a correction, not just a 50 percenter. We've already had a 50 percenter. Right. You know, Bitcoin's had plenty. Yeah. Yeah. You go down and wipe out everybody who's bought this for the last decade and they're going to be talking to themselves and they'll be saying, well, I thought this was going to beat gold. I guess my granddad was right. Gold. Yeah, gold, not digital gold. Okay, so I don't know the level of your expertise, you know, as a computer scientist or whatnot. But let's say this wipeout happens, right, that you're concerned of here. What, if anything, are you saying about blockchain technology? I mean, do you expect that we would continue to use it? I have no opinion. You're talking beyond this. I'm just saying that if the technicals further unfold, as we think they will, you'll have a you have to have you will have a full public rethink about all the assumptions that have undergirded this thing for the last five years, especially. Okay, but mostly as an investment asset. Yeah, as a place to put your money. It's not cash. Dollar's not a place to keep your money either. It depreciates by 80% every decade, increase in quantity. This will prove not to be an alternative. And what does it leave you with? It goes back to the hard assets. Hard assets, real world things like grains, oil, copper, gold, and silver, especially. Yeah. Okay, I just wanted to make sure. and I think we clarified, you're not saying that, hey, we might not use the blockchain for all sorts of things going forward as a technological platform, but this just may cause people to say, look, I'm not going to treat this as an asset class going forward. I'm not going to use it anymore. I'm going to go some other way to deal with my finances. Yeah. Period. All right. Well, Michael, look, that was a wonderful, detailed walkthrough, your latest report there. Thank you for doing this and being so transparent about your outlook there. I'm about to ask where people can go to follow you and your work. But before I do that, is there anything that is majorly burning brightly on your radar that I just haven't thought to ask you about yet? Not really. The thing I think is brightly burning for us is the T-bond market, which it is for Jamie Dimon as well, and some others, as you've noted. That's the factor that is not built into these markets, but it is built into the Fed. And though they may not be screaming about it. They're screaming about it. Okay. Okay. Let me ask you this, just getting away from the dollars and cents of it all, um, as an investor, what, what do you think this world looks like for the average American? We'll say, if all the trends you think come to pass on the timeline, you think they're going to come to pass. It sounds like you're predicting a pretty rough couple of years. Yeah, I think it'd be a rethink of a lot of things, meaning public assumption about certain institutions. Like right now, we know the two political parties are fractured so badly that even the Trump party doesn't exist anymore, even. And some of the main bloggers that were supporters of his have said, I wish I hadn't done that. You know who I'm talking about. So they're fragmented on both sides. You have a total fragmentation politically. We don't know where it's headed. Is the Democrat Party going ultra socialist or is it going to try to be moderate? The Republican Party, you know, et cetera. We don't need to talk about it anymore. But other things, institutions that we've assumed are guiding forces will become in doubt. I suspect there won't be a Federal Reserve in the next five years, maybe sooner. I suspect an income tax, and I'm not going to advocate anything. I'm not doing that. I'm just simply saying it's dysfunctional. If it becomes dysfunctional as a source of revenue because people are hurting so badly they can't afford to pay, then the IRS isn't getting the percentage of revenue it needs to get. What's the alternative? I think you do a national sales tax. But I mean, things can get turned over. And things you didn't think were possible could become reality. And things you thought were eternal won't be eternal. And I don't know what they're going to be, but you can bet there'll be a lot of that. Okay, so I'm just hearing you kind of advise to people in those comments, plan for disruptive change coming forward. And, you know, economically, times might get tougher. So again, whatever you can do now to insulate yourself as much as possible. Don't argue with it. Just be with the right side and do your best to protect your family and institutions. And we focus on that. And I invest accordingly. In fact, my investments are listed in the back. Not quantity, but what am I in? you're in. I'm heavily in silver and silver related. I've got some commodity related stuff as well. But anyway, that's where I am. That's how I see reality based on our long-term momentum. But the problem now is when you engage these other forces, like if you're in gold and just looking at that narrow windshield, you shouldn't watch that stock market because when it goes, watch the bond market because the fed will do what it always does print print print all right my friend um thank you again for um just being so generous and transparent with with you know both your your overall outlook your specific outlook for certain asset classes and then sharing exactly what you're invested in. For folks that would like to follow you in your work, Michael, where should they go? Olivermsa.com for momentum structural analysis. Oliver MSA. Request some sample copies. Spend your time looking at our unorthodox technical methodology. We explain it in reasonable broad terms. Okay. You do. And what's nice about what we did today is people can actually see what your reports are like. So we don't have to tell them they've actually seen it yeah all right fantastic and um michael as i usually do when i edit this i will put up the link uh to your site there so folks know where to go folks the link will also be in the description below this video so you can get there with one click um can't thank you enough michael folks please again thank join me in thanking michael for just again being so liberal with how much he shares with us all by hitting that like button and then clicking on the subscribe button below as well as that little bell icon right next to it. As a reminder, we've just surpassed 175,000 subscribers here on YouTube. We're gunning for 200,000 as quickly as we can because that really helps give additional focus to this channel on behalf of the YouTube algorithm. So if you can help us get to 2000, please do hit that subscribe button. And then lastly, in addition to considering signing up for Michael Services, if you would like to get the assistance of a professional financial advisor, especially maybe asking some of the questions of like, all right, I want to do some of the things Michael's doing, but given my personal situation, what are the right assets? What are the right ratios? That type of stuff. If you already don't have a good advisor giving you counsel, consider talking to one of the ones that Thoughtful Money endorses. These are the ones you see with me on this channel week in and week out. To set up one of those consultations, just fill out the very short form at thoughtfulmoney.com. And as a reminder, these consultations are totally free. There's no commitments involved. It's just a service they offer to be as helpful as possible to as many investors as possible. Michael, I can't thank you. I really appreciate your comments there at the end about just trying to make this real and practical for the average person. But thank you again for all the hard work you put in to try to help people at least improve their financial part of their lives so that regardless of what comes in the future, they hopefully have a pretty good financial defense against it. Thank you, Adam. All right. And everybody else, thanks so much for watching.