Will shortage be the big word this year? Seems to be a trend starting here. Want a big fat steak? The beef herd is the lowest it has been in 75 years; it will cost you. How about silver's meteoric rise. On Tv they tell you silver has an industrial usage, yeah, basically the same one it had this time last year. Metals and minerals are all the rage this year as possible shortages loom. Oil is already ramping. Wars are usually inflationary as they draw resources away from the regular economy, Just the excuse Wall Street speculators are looking to start a big ramp job? Manufacture  another shortage somewhere?

The State of the Union is Tuesday night. If you are Mr. Combover, do you want America watching the evening news and seeing bloody children being carried away from crumbled buildings. Nope. It's way too risky; you wait until after. Too much can go wrong. There are plenty of other issues he can lie about. jmho

AI worries....laughing my @@@ out. It's incredible how much fantasy they show to justify market movements they have projected well before. I'm waiting that one day when the next real market drop 

takes hold, they justify if saying that it's fat finger the cause of it. Fat finger that has remained sticked to the sell button. Trading needs patience and this consolidation period is not exception. 

eom

NO, NOT AS YET, A FEW MORE PULLBACKS & NEW ATHs before the AI crash

Here is a good article on this topic:

https://articles.sto...w-to-combat-it/

According to my risk summation system, the days this week with the highest probability of a seeing a turn in or acceleration of the current trend in the DJIA are Tuesday February 17th and Wednesday the 18th.  As has been the case for many weeks now the summation for the other days this week are also uncomfortably high meaning turns could easily occur any day of the week, not a particularly helpful situation, but it is what it is.

Last week the February 9th turn window in red below didn't really amount to anything, however the Wednesday the 11th turn window tagged the double top before a sharp drop, so the system was batting 500.  

The breakout to the upside from the consolidation area between the two horizontal green lines shown in the hourly DJIA finviz.com plot above that caught me by surprise week before last reversed by the end of last week.  The top green line on the consolidation area now appears to be overhead resistance, not a good look.  With the DJIA currently rising off the mid-Friday the 13th low at the end of trading last week, you have to think that tomorrow's or maybe Wednesday's turn window will send the DJIA heading down confirming the failure of the breakout above the consolidation with the lower green line of the consolidation the first target for the decline.

The failed breakout developing looks a lot like a pattern called Turtle Soup made famous by the technician Linda Raschke in which a multiday new breakout high fails almost immediately trapping breakout buying trading systems forcing them to puke their positions as the market falls accelerating the decline. This week should tell the tale if the market is in hot soup or not.

Regards,

Douglas