Did NASDAQ 'Ring the Bell' On a Market Top? #SilverSqueeze Prepares Another Assault

A Wall Street adage dating back to the turn of the previous century (1800s-1900s) warns that "nobody rings a bell at a market top or bottom." There are many iterations of the quote of which nobody to date has definitively discovered the originator. Still, the message is clear. Market tops and bottoms are tricky devils to discern, and there isn't a man, woman, or child who has been able to call them correctly in advance with any kind of accuracy.

Many have tried and failed. Even some of the greatest investors have missed market tops or bottoms and more than a few have called for markets to turn one way only to see them go in the opposite direction. Timing may be everything in life, but it's a difficult, if not impossible art to master. So, one must proceed with all due caution.

It's been obvious in recent weeks that the tech giants leading the markets have fallen back to a secondary position, guiding the NASDAQ from a front-runner to a laggard. While the S&P, Dow Jones Industrials, and the NYSE Composite Index all made new all-time highs this past Friday, the NASDAQ was still playing catch-up, though it did close within striking range of it's all-time closing high (14,095.47, 2/12/21) on Friday when it finished at 14,052.34, it's highest close in two months.

Subsequently, the NASDAQ closed lower both Monday and Tuesday, dropping 137 points Monday and another 128 Tuesday. As markets prepare for Wednesday's trading, futures are again trending to the downside, indicating another negative open. How that plays out throughout the session will be important to note, especially if one is intent on making buys or selling winners and losers in the near term. The NASDAQ's failure to recapture all-time highs may be a "bell ringer" double top and if it is one would do well to sell just about everything.

This is not an endorsement nor a prediction. It is just something to which one should pay close attention. If the NAZ continues to try and fail or just continues to slide, it could be a top. How far all markets may slide from this point forward nobody knows. It could just be a normal turn of trading, the beginning of a correction, or, worst case, the beginning of a bear market. Everybody and their sister-in-laws knows that stocks are priced beyond perfection and bull markets do not last forever, no matter how much funny money Jerome Powell and his friends at the Fed print.

That said, some investment advice from the inscrutable Yogi Berra: "You’ve got to be careful if you don’t know where you’re going, ’cause you might not get there."

Besides equities being tanked pretty well on Tuesday, some other news has been making the rounds. It appears that the rascals from the reddit group, r/Wallstreetsilver have found some allies in their fight to bring down what they consider the evil and criminal COMEX silver futures market riggers. Craig Hemke of Sprott Money penned an editorial on the site's blog Tuesday, titled, A Time to Fight Back in which he calls out to all silver stackers for an assault on the physical and ETF silver markets to buy 100 of physical silver on May 1.

The logic behind Hemke's call to arms is that it is the 10-year anniversary of the May Day Massacre of 2011.

After the price of COMEX Silver had closed at $48.50 on Friday, April 29, many expected the price of silver to continue rising. It was on a tear and there seemed to be no reason why silver should not continue rallying. On Sunday May 1, as Hemke writes, "during the very quiet and pre-Asia early evening Globex trade..." the price of silver futures fell by $6.50 in 12 minutes and from there it continued to decline for weeks, then months, then years, finally settling in at a low of $12.00 in March of last year, at the onset of the CV-19 crisis.

Since then, silver has moved up nicely, hitting nearly $30/ounce in August, and then again in February when the #SilverSqueeze was in full flight. The redditeers haven't actually backed off from their efforts and recently the LBMA actually admitted to some danger from social media.

So, for the Silver Squeezers, it's "once more unto the breach," this time with reinforcements. Hemke also noted in his blog the efforts of Chris Marcus, scion of Arcadia Economics, who is in Washington, DC this week trying to get some straight talk from the CFTC. Marcus, author of The Big Silver Short is very much engaged in the fight for freedom and market transparency.

We all wish him the best.

AT THE CLOSE, TUESDAY, APRIL 20, 2021:
Dow: 33,821.30, -256.33 (-0.75%)
NASDAQ: 13,786.27, -128.50 (-0.92%)
S&P 500: 4,134.94, -28.32 (-0.68%)
NYSE: 15,944.61, -162.94 (-1.01%)