It happens when inflammatory events (usually political, terror or war related, but also including things like Ebola, Bird Flu and the like) crop up; stocks go down and hysteria starts to build.  The mainstream media jump aboard and next thing you know you’ve got people heading for the exits… right into the next bottom.  In the case of the current corrective consolidation, a disappointment in the Trump administration’s Healthcare follies rolled right into the war-like events in Syria and Afghanistan.  Presto!  A much needed correction of the over-bullishness was on.

Going the other way is gold, which never fails to get the terror, war or pestilence bid du jour.  Sure, the media may pump a bit here, but the real pumping comes from within the gold “community” (the term, coined I believe by James Sinclair, is a dead giveaway to group-think) itself.  The community always stands ready to explain to the greater public why it has been right all along; and headline-making events are held up as proof.

Now, back in a little place we like to call Reality, the stock market is still in the state it has been in since last year when we got a bullish moving average signal with the weekly EMA 20 crossing above the EMA 50.  My little speculation about a Left Shoulder to a potentially bearish H&S is just that, speculation at this time.  The moving averages and the major trend say so.  As a side note, notice that the AAII (Individual Investors) have been MIA.  They have been among the smarter of the dumb money for years now; but we might wonder if the final top will come when AAII finally takes the bait.

Our ‘amateur cyclist’ chart (for entertainment purposes only, folks) has instructed that a correction of some kind has been possible or even probable in and around here, according to the 12 month cycle.  It’s a monthly chart, so expect movements not to present themselves in the same time frames that our always-engaged human brains fire off thoughts and opinions.