This Is Concerning...

Today's number might be a little bit concerning for investors and traders. Negative 34%, the decline in big truck sales over the last 12 months. And yes, it's preceded problems in the economy a couple of times before. We'll be looking at that along with the current volatility in metals to see whether something is breaking in the system. And while great demand zones have held so far, we have seen many changes to margin requirements and a few darkpool trades. Join us as we cover stocks, commodities, and cryptos because this might not be systemic just yet, but we do need to look underneath the hood. See you very soon, guys.

Well, welcome back everyone to the Daily Show. My name is Thomas Atinson and in today's video, we'll be taking a look at everything that we need to know from the macro to the data to of course what's going on on Wall Street and why are they placing so many large transactions. Right now, we're in the thick of earning season, which means, of course, we need to kick things off by discussing that. But first up, I want to talk about the falling US truck sales. And that points to, of course, a little bit of a potential problem here in the US economy and indeed the worldwide economy.

Now there are a few reasons why this may have occurred and I posted this over on X including those reasons which is postco fleet buying higher financing costs regulatory uncertainty and of course goods to services shifts but realistically in the past US truck sales have pointed to potential weakness coming in and you might note that the both the 2001 recession great financial crisis and even periods of time before that including the 1980s into the 1990s where we had some weakness at the start of that particular decade and also the 2016 commodities crash. We really do tend to see this be a bit of a forward indicator. That is it's slightly ahead of the game when it comes to weakness internally in the economies. It's kind of like how on the channel here we also look at US freight and we particularly look at railroads because of course railroads tell us a lot about the American consumer.

Speaking of weakness, there has been a lot of volatility of course in silver and gold. So while trucks have been falling and we'll talk more about that later on, the big thing here has been of course silver, gold and the crashes. Now there could be a couple of reasons why that's happened and most of them have to do with liquidations and most of them have to do with a system a massive system failure in terms of everybody getting liquidated. But you can see here posted from Bob Coleman over on X that the CME Group increased their leverage again required in terms of margin and basically this also caused quite a lot of liquidations through the Monday session particularly leading into the US open.

Now why does it happen? Well, if you're not familiar with margin loans, generally what will happen is you'll get a call on them. Then the next day you'll be said you'll be told kind of you need to put the money in the account or we're going to close the position. And then sometime by midm morning often those positions close. And that's estimated to be what happened yesterday in terms or even today depending on where you are in the world in terms of of course the market right now and specifically of course the Asian markets which have usually quite a lot of leverage when it comes to silver and gold.

Now when the CME raised their margins you can see here that all of a sudden the markets did start to fall. So it is something to look at but it's very normal for margins to be increased as you get extreme volatility to help certain companies of course possibly deal with the ill liquidity that happens at these times.

Now maybe more concerning than everything is of course what this could mean. Silver just had a historic crash obviously one of the fastest if not the fastest really ever in terms of pure market capitalization size. And Nautilus has put out a really good report here showing when silver goes on one of these epic runs, how it tends to run, how it tends to end, and of course whether that usually leads into weakness overall. And you can see here when you look at all of the previous periods, including the 1970s, which is the famous one, and I do know this is a little bit small, this chart, so it's a little bit hard to see, but basically what it's showing is really this image, which is that we get these huge rallies, we get busts, and often that is the kind of topping point for silver.

Now, I'm not sure it is this time around. You could say, but you know, the evidence points to it is well, we are most likely in a currency war. We're obviously got bricks versus swift. We could be having changing world orders. Who knows? All of these types of things are to be considered. And what we'll be looking for on this channel is, of course, darkpool trades. We'll be looking for some of the biggest out there from Wall Street. And of course, really focusing in on what they could mean for us.

Because you can see here that we have quite a lot of large transactions coming through near the close. And you'll note here that we just saw before gold actually went down a little bit further. monster trades coming in near that point from uh gold GLD and also a couple of other gold style funds. Now, why is it important? Well, they were all clustered and they all happened after the fall. So, it looks like some large institution was buying it. Now, some people speculated, and we talked about this in the last video, that it might have been JP Morgan getting out of some positions, which obviously uh kind of corresponds pretty well with that price. But it also could be some people starting to buy the dip because in many ways, you know, what we've seen recently on gold and silver, as you would guys would know being watching this channel for quite some time, was not something that we thought was just about a currency debasement trade. It's it's also central banks purchasing it. It's also the time of the cycle that we're in in terms of the markets right now and everything else.

Now, we have seen these large transactions before act as kind of tops or bottoms. We did see a massive darkpool sweep on SIVR just before the men massive crash here and you can see darkpool sweeps usually are the faster transaction. So, something big happened and we know that was a epic crash after that particular massive trade. But at the same time, we also got some large gold trades coming through. We don't know their bias yet, but when I look at certain volumes and things like that, it does look like there was a decent amount of accumulation starting to happen, which is a good sign, and it will correspond well with the technicals that we see later in today's show.

Let's have a look at the S&P 500 now. So, you might think, well, if uh if gold and silver are crashing, everything else is as well. Well, it's not quite like that. And that's why we said in our previous video and we say it again, it doesn't look like it's systemic yet. It doesn't look like it's everywhere in terms of crash. And basically, we have a market that's looking a little bit different to what people may expect. If you take a look here, you can see that the put volume according to Subu Trade actually activated again on the top end, which basically means that everyone tried to go short on the S&P and the NASDAQ and everything else as we saw silver and gold crashing. But that's not exactly what happened.

And some of the reasons why that could be is because the Fed chair, the current one that obviously has now been announced coming in, Walsh, basically Kevin Walsh, basically we have some information here that he might be a little bit different to what people expected. Maybe a little bit less rate cuts overall, but in general, he might change the game in terms of liquidity and a few other things. But I think when you really look at the flows underneath the hood, it seems like it's kind of more of the same. And I think that's kind of important. This will be an important story to continue to go through. But he's looking at AI being the future, AI being a huge force for deflation, not inflation. And of course, he's kind of betting on that. So the market may like that from some of the tech stocks. And we saw them react mixed to this. Uh, but actually some were up over the last 24 hours, some were down. I don't think that's the main trade though. I think at the moment what what's really happening here is that the market is still quite broad and we're seeing different sectors come through and that's what we've been discussing over the last 3 to four months since the Fed started cutting cycle again which I think is important.

You can see here Duality Research has a great report here showing the Fed funds rate where it is right now. The markets expect uh basically us to hit probably the terminal rate which basically means the end of the cutting cycle by December of 2026. And this effectively means that there's only around two cuts expected over this year. And that's a lot less than of course people thought before. But what has been happening this earning season is pretty good earnings. We see here the economy after tax corporate profit margins here from Eric Bassin over on X is pretty high. And this means that we're coming into this earning season. Palanteer just had an earnings result as well and it's done okay. And that kind of shows us that usually the strength still is there. If the earnings results were bad and we were seeing tech really miss, then while I think the market would drop, I still think that there's enough bulls around to buy it up initially. And that's actually what we're looking for this year. Each earning season will be one of the most important and we're looking for banks. We're looking for uh commodity stocks. We're looking for of course what's happening in tech very very closely.

One thing the market is doing though is it's turning more defensive in the sector allocations. We've seen staples do well, which you'll see in a moment. Healthcare do better than you would expect. And of course, even utilities start to poke up recently. So, this is a changing of the guard, a broadening pattern, which is starting to focus a little bit more on maybe I would say the defensive positions including some value stocks as well. Investor intelligence, bulls versus bears. This one here is from the market stats. Basically, just showing that for the first time in a while, bulls kind of started to take over from the bears. Then, of course, we get this volatility. But really the reason why that's happening is people are just kind of, you know, they're just saying, "Oh, well, I've got to be in. I don't really, you know, doesn't matter if I think the markets are bearish or not. I'm going to try to get in because the market's been up for so long." And in fact, we've just had nine consecutive months up in a row for the S&P. And you can see it's very rare to get that back in the '9s, back in the 2017s, actually interesting during Trump's last presidency. And they ended up being quite bullish years. And the same thing has happened here with the Dow Jones. As you can see, strength often does equal strength in these markets. And that's because the markets tend to start pricing in this future of even better gains, even better earnings. And while I don't think that's going to happen in 2016, and I think we will have a bad earnings at some point, so far the market price action is bullish. And we still haven't seen the bonds market, which you'll see later on, flinch. It's just been markets moving secretly defensive. maybe not so secretly in gold and silver, but of course they've done a wipe out there. But you can see here consumer staples, massive gains, um 6.8%, you know, market of stocks average return. Staples came out of nowhere. Not normal for an early or midcycle market to see Staples doing well. So this is starting to point towards, you know, maybe a little bit uh on the later cycle. And you can see here financials actually down. So yeah, duality research with a good report there and yeah, it's kind of showing us that the market is broadening but at the same time there's clearly some risks there and they are coming through in this defensive asset allocation.

S&P 500 quarterly EPS estimates so far you can see here according to this report here from duality again and Bloomberg source you'll notice that is some serious gains and again that just means the earnings is there. If the earnings is there then of course we need to be thinking well so far so good for the market and although the market may fall at some point we expect that in midterms usually two falls during midterm years at the same time it's hard to be bearish when you get those types of earnings. S&P 500 performance for the rest of the year went up in January is pretty good. We do expect still the quarter 1 to have something going on in it but haven't seen that just yet. and commodity prices are still of course breaking out from multi-year kind of holds. So even though gold and silver have been in the news, we've seen energy sector pick up recently as you can see here. And we've also seen of course other metals as well start to play the game and again those other sectors.

This week we still have big earnings. Palanteer seemed to do pretty well. Didn't get that head and shoulders towards the short side if you were trying to go short. bounced off that key neckline and then of course we saw PayPal, AMD, Alphabet, ARM, Amazon. So many different companies obviously coming out there with uh different information and the main thing I guess is that all of those uh particular uh I guess you would say companies uh while they're not the well of course Alphabet's the top tier in Amazon. It's going to be really more of the is the American consumer holding up and that is really the question I think we need to look at because we've got a chart coming up later that does show you that the consumer is under some pressure at least when we see price action.

Here are the options movements in terms of what the flow is telling us from the options market. But I did want to just quickly talk about Bitcoin because things are different when you go to Bitcoin. They've just been weak weak weak weak weak and we hit the first critical level of 7678 which you can see here Grant Hawkidge has and it's kind of rudderless in some ways. We didn't manage to hold that 94 plus. Obviously when we lost 86 we liquidated. We've liquidated a lot at 76 as well. I think there was 2 or3 billion there. And it kind of feels like it's a bit of an attack on Sailor in some ways when you really think about it. Yeah. So, it's it'd be interesting to see if this all has to do a little bit with MSTR, but we are at a key critical support and we'll look at that soon.

Another thing we saw was the largest transaction ever recorded on HODL, which is Van Bitcoin Trust. And although Bitcoin's a little bit lower than this right now, it could still be a buy. It did happen, of course, at the dip price. So, somebody probably was like, "Oh, wow. I I I don't mind that now that it's gotten down to that kind of 7678. This is of course a story to keep watching. We will be watching that price action. So, make sure to sub for it.

S&P, you can see here the advanced decline still up as we argue if that's still going well. You know, there's not that many things to be worried about at least in the stock market. And you can see here the updated options high and low data levels. I've also managed to get for you guys today the S&P charts. We'll have the rest of them coming in the next video. But for the S&P, the main thing with options is that we just hit just on 7,000. So just remember$7,000 is a massive call wall, guys. It is for the third, it is for the fourth. If we go through 7,000, we're probably going to get some positive gamma going on. The one thing that's interesting is that we've got puts sitting just underneath everything as well. 69.50, 6930, all these areas we've got, of course, the puts sitting on as well, which is a huge deal. And I guess the way I look at this is that the market clearly a lot of people want to still short it and and there's of course a lot of 7,000 levels, but interestingly every time the market even drops or the VIX spikes or anything, people say this is the time, this is the one and there's just been like so many of those occurrences as we've had a broadening market. So interesting levels. Uh, I think that 6,800 is of course a very big technical for the S&P at this point in terms of support, but 7,000 plus breakout that's probably going to create a positive gamma squeeze. So, I'd say we have hit a technical level for a lot of people that are targeting that zone. You know, 7,000 is a massive psychological level. Once you break it, you do tend to usually lead into more gains uh because that's just the way that's a massive psychological level. So, this is right at resistance and probably not the best entry point you've ever seen on the S&P, at least technically.

Let's have a look now at whether the bonds market is flinching. So far, with the updated data we've got so far, not really. And you can see here as well, high yield junk did drop, but it's still well above. The same thing with LQD, which is corporates. We haven't seen really a dump of corporates just yet, but it has weakened a little bit. So, that's something to watch. But what I will be watching is the American consumer which you can kind of track here with XLY XLP. And I find it interesting that we're right at that support just before the Amazon earnings. So of course we'll be watching that one very very closely.

Dollar index did rally a little bit. It's kind of holding its own for now. So we'll see what happens there. It's kind of just sitting. And you can see here hedges against the dollar which uh traditionally I guess you would say the yen and traditionally the Swiss Frank. Both of those have reversed. The trend is still down though. So, it's not like a full reversal of DD dollarization.

Maybe the biggest most important thing though is yields. 10-year yield has jumped quite considerably over the last 24 hours. And again, this is in line with what we think, which is that we believe the 10 year, 20 year, 30-year might actually keep rising. And that could push things like energy stocks and other sectors actually still higher. And you can see that when you're looking at certain commodities that maybe aren't just gold, silver, that kind of thing.

In terms of gold and silver, uh, gold definitely hit into the 4,400 to 4,300 range, which I actually did discuss in my macro show, which we do privately over at fxevolution.com. That's a once a week special show there. If you ever want to join the market masters club, guys, might be a good time to do so cuz that was pretty cool to have that uh massive amount of people in there and also to have you guys discussing so many single stocks, which it is a single stock market at the moment. And you can see here that it hit that level of range between 44 43 which I thought was a pretty good support level for gold because of course it dropped so considerably. And the other thing that's important about all of this is that we start to see cross uh analysis um kind of levels. So we saw silver which had look at look at this range. You might not think this is crazy but this was pretty big 18.5% range. Longleg dogee at the level of demand. And then we also have here copper coming off that first big potential bull zone after wiping out two lows. It also happened on platinum. It also happened on platium. So what that's kind of telling us is that along with those darkpool transactions, there's probably a buyer in this level. And we can see that cuz the weak rejections have already happened. But it was pretty pretty noticeable even when it was happening. We talked about it of course in the live show as well, the public live show we did for the Monday open. You guys would have seen that. And this is just such an important crossorrelation level. So I feel like we're hitting quite a lot of those including even crypto. And yeah, that's an interesting point because these were drastic falls. But to stop a freight train generally takes a little while. So I expect volatility to continue to be quite high in those metals as more and more stories come out about what exactly just happened on that historic Friday.

Chinese markets they fell off but they've since rallied and of course they broke above 2725 which to me kind of exposes that 29,000 plus range. So I feel like these are kind of finding their own a little bit and emerging markets picked back up again which has been one of the better sectors that we've been or one of the better areas that money's been flowing into.

In terms of sectors, of course, as we discussed, you know, staples really has been one of the weird standouts recently, and I saw that on the charts u a little while ago, of course, the breakout here. Um early Jan was probably the best go and um around this this level here. So, early Jan, you started to see flows and you can see when staples go though, it can be a sign of late cycle. So, one for us to keep watching.

Tesla 420 barely held. We'll bring back the options for that one. But basically 420 is of course put support. Break under that could go 400. 460 is where the call buyers really get back in. And Nvidia did drop a little bit over the last 24 hours. But you can see here Apple went up 4% breaking through. And really probably the all that is the worst way you could ever write mags here guys. Um you can see here the main level that we're watching is really what's happening with the Magnificent 7. If it breaks underneath 62 bad. If it breaks above here again, it's probably pretty strong because it's been doing not much since September, since really the rate cut of last year.

Financials, we did see one small bank go insolvent. Uh that being said was so small and it doesn't seem to have shown up yet in the charts, but we do have a few ways of looking at this. We will bring them back in the next videos. And I thought I'd just kind of bring the NASDAQ up. You can see nice bounce, but no breakout of 262. If that happens, of course, that's quite strong. Usually a new break high equals further strength in the future.

When it comes to Bitcoin, as we mentioned in the previous video, it kind of completed one of the major kind of sell scenarios. We've hit here 77. If we close below, I think 75 12 75. We're probably going down to the 685 level. And at the moment, the trend is obviously down, but we have stabilized. So, Bitcoin, if you went really small time frame, you could certainly make an argument that a break of this little 795 might get some day traders interested in buying, maybe up to the 84 level, but it's not diabolical yet on this price. Uh, that being said, you know, for a lot of people, especially when you think about the average buy, I think the average buy is somewhere in here. Um, so realistically, the average person now in Bitcoin is is probably not doing so well. So technicals will probably matter here, but Bitcoin, I feel like a lot of it has to do with this stock here and and what's going on there. So MSTR obviously down at 139, which is a far cry from where it was when it was up there at 500 bucks. So just remember this is a cautionary tale and we've we've often said this about this stock of, you know, when a story becomes so well known, if it's in the press, it's in the price.

Guys, there's a lot more information coming out this week, including more earnings. we'll get more reports out and I hope you have a fantastic day. That was historic stuff. So, you know, you've got to pencil that down in the back of your memory and say I was there, but also hopefully we've learned something from it. So, I always say, you know, did we know that was possible? Yes, we have seen something like this before, but to expect silver to drop, you know, 30 40% in a day obviously is is drastic and and that is a sign of massive leverage getting liquidated and I think we're starting to see the stories of that.

In terms of broad market, we just don't see a systemic problem just yet. That doesn't mean it's not there, but remember, even if you know it's there, until it becomes a problem, hey, no one's going to be selling. That's the problem. All right, catch you in the next one. Bye for now.