Bulling Bullion

Hola from Mexico's Isla Mujeres. I'm winding up a two-month extended family vacation down here, and we love this place. It's sad to leave, but I'll be returning to my more usual pace of portfolio updates and fuller Commitments of Traders posts when I get home to Canada, where we've had a pretty brutal winter this year. Or so I hear from depressed friends... Cheers!

But I digress. Friday's Commitments of Traders report gave me two new signals: bullish for bullion and my trading setup for the S&P 500 goes to cash on April 18. Check out my newly updated latest signals table for more details based on the CFTC's latest COT data release. My other setups remain the same: cash for crude oil and natural gas, bearish for the 30-year Treasury bond and bullish for the Nikkei.

For gold, the signal goes from cash to bullish on Monday's open of trading. For the S&P 500, readers may recall that the wrong-way small traders got highly bearish last week, which gave me a bullish signal for the setup with a three-week delay (i.e. on April 11). Friday's COT report showed the same small trader crowd suddenly getting super-bullish in their net futures and options positioning as a percentage of the total open interest. That pushed my setup back into the cash column. (Recall that the "smart money" commercial hedgers have been bullish, but I need both groups of traders to give the same signal before I will take a trade.)

Good luck this coming week.

TAGS: SPX, S&P 500, gold, BKX, Bank Index, natural gas, Nikkei, crude oil,Treasury, bond, COT, Commitments of Traders,derivatives, Black Swans,market timing,trading system development, CFTC,Commodity Futures Trading Commission,COTs Timer, out-of-sample testing, walk-around testing