The Federal Reserve Bank of New York recently released its December survey of over 1,300 households on their expectations for their own economic well being and that of the national economy of the United States.

They found that consumers are expecting inflation to rise to over 3% over the next few years, a jump from previous surveys. They reported that “the increase was driven by respondents without a college degree. Our measure of disagreement across respondents (the difference between the 75th and 25th percentile of inflation expectations) declined slightly at the one-year horizon but increased at the three-year horizon to its highest level since May 2020.”

They expect medical care costs to rise from 7.1% a year to 9.1% and also see a coming rise in real estate prices as with “median home price change expectations, which have been trending upward after reaching a series’ low of 0% in April 2020, increased sharply from 3.0% in November to 3.6% in December, the highest reading since July 2018. The increase was broad based across age groups, income groups, and Census regions.”

With the 10-year Treasury bond trading below 1.10%, as of Monday’s closing price, it is clear that the US government and corporate bond markets are not priced for 3% inflation growth. If the consumers are correct eventually there will be a decline in the value of bonds across the board as they will need to return higher yields to attract investors. For the Federal Reserve that may mean implementing “yield control” at some point to rig bond prices at artificially high levels.

Despite the negative publicity and even political attacks that the Robinhood brokerage firm and app has had last week more people are opening up accounts with them and more of their customers are piling into Gamestop Corp. (NYSE: GME) stock.

Robinhood provides its customers with a list of the 100 most popular and widely owned stocks and ranks them by the number of people who own them. On Thursday morning Gamestop Corp. (NYSE: GME) was number 23 on this list and by Saturday morning it was number 15, showing that many additional customers, probably several hundred thousand, bought the stock to add to their account.

On Friday Gamestop Corp. (NYSE: GME) was the 12 most actively traded mid-cap/large cap stock on all of the US stock exchanges, while AMC Entertainment (NYSE: AMC) was number one, doing over 500 million shares of volume and has also been targeted as a stock with a huge short position to buy by the WallStreetBets Reddit message board community. That community itself had 4.1 million members on it as of Thursday at 2:00 PM EST and gained over 2.6 million additional members by Saturday morning.

All of this demonstrates massive herd activity in the financial markets. The WallStreetBets message board also has targeted silver investing and the iShares Silver Trust (NYSE: SLV) exchange traded fund as something to buy. The ETF went up 1.09% on 113 million shares and helped to fuel sympathy gains in silver mining stocks both large and small. On Friday, Robinhood also restricted trading in it to no more than five shares, along with 50 additional stocks.

This trading action in silver has gotten the attention of many so called “silver bugs,” such as Steven Tremblay, a private investor whose tagline on Twitter is, “I am an investor that strongly believes we are in the biggest debt bubble in the history of mankind. I am a strong believer in gold, silver, and health.” He was interviewed by Palisades Radio in this segment.

Steven Tremblay calls silver a “miracle metal.” Time will tell if more of the WallStreetBets and Robinhood herd buys enough of it to get silver ETF’s and stocks to appear on the Robinhood top 100 list. None have yet.

This morning shares of Gamestop Corp (NYSE: GME) are poised to gap up on the opening bell with a 100%+ percentage gain from yesterday’s close following news that the Robinhood brokerage company has lifted some of the trading restrictions for its customers for the stock. Robinhood has been in the news and under attack by opinion makers and various politicians for restricting trading in the stock, however all of the news coverage and media attention has served to attract so much attention to the company and its trading app that this morning it has risen to be the number one most downloaded app in the Apple and Android stores.

This is very noteworthy for Gamestop (NYSE: GME) stock trading today, because the stock is ranked number 23 out of the 100 most owned stocks among Robinhood traders. Notice that Reddit is number two on this list. At 2:00 PM EST yesterday the WallStreetBets Reddit group that has been the focus of attention around Gamestop stock trading had 4.2 million members. As of now it has 6 million.

You can’t see the stocks at the top of this list, this is just a screen shot of part of it. The number one stock is Apple and second is Tesla. Robinhood users tend to closely follow this top 100 list and trade in a way that creates herd like behavior. It will be fascinating to watch how this unfolds going forward. The company has been under political attack yesterday from several politicians and the Senate is soon to hold hearings on the trading activities around Gamestop (NYSE: GME) and surrounding figures and events.

The CEO of Robinhood appeared on CNBC Thursday to defend his company and explain its decisions.

This is an ongoing story.

This has been a fascinating week in the markets. We saw Janet Yellen testify to Congress at a time in which by all appearances long-term Treasury bond yields have made a secular bottom over the past few months. Inflationary pressures will in time force the Federal Reserve to begin yield control.

On Monday I made an update on gold, silver, and mining stocks in which I noted that all three have been in a drawn out sideways consolidation trend since August. The way to trade in such a time is to use oversold dips as buy points. We got that last week and yesterday gold and mining stocks rallied enough that many gave buy signals on their daily stochastics, by having them go back above 20.

Take a look at the price of gold.

Gold is trading in a range with $1800 as support and $1950 as resistance. It now is setup to run back up towards that resistance level and once it breaks through it look for the next big up leg for gold to begin. That could start soon or it could be in the March or April period if the trading range persists long enough to cause the 200-day Bollinger Bands on gold to fall down below 15.00.

Many mining stocks rallied hard yesterday. For instance, PASS, which I have a position in was up over 7%. As far as big caps go, the one that appears to me to be in the simplest buy spot is Newmont Mining, as its 200-day Bollinger Bands are now closer together than any of the other ones.

I own shares of NEM. Yesterday my top stock pick for this month, Sonoro Gold (OTCMKTS: SMOFF) also went up over 4%. It is still in a good buy spot and had some more positive news yesterday too.

Yesterday Sonoro Gold issued a press release to report reporting that “remaining assay results from its 2020 drilling campaign at the Cerro Caliche gold project in Sonora, Mexico. The 2021 drilling program is currently underway with approximately 50 additional RC and core holes expected to be completed by the end of the first quarter. The latest assays further support the Company’s consideration of the viability for a bulk mining heap-leach development proposal with a conceptual throughput of up to 20,000 tonnes per day (tpd).”

The Sonoro Gold CEO & President Ken MacLeod and Chairman John Darch are going to hold a live webinar today on January 21st at 1:30 pm (PST). They will discuss the recent series of drilling & metallurgical results from the Cerro Caliche project site. Afterwards will be a live Q&A session.

To register for this webinar click here.

-Mike

Disclosure: Mike Swanson owns shares of Sonoro Gold Corp. Because it is a small cap stock with a market cap of less than $100 million he has put himself in a trading blackout on the stock and will not buy or sell a share of it for at least 30-days from the date of this post. Wallstreetwindow.com, is owned by Timingwallstreet, Inc., which is being compensated by a third party (Leadgopher LLC DBA Pinnacle Ad Network) to conduct an investor awareness advertising and marketing campaign for Inca One Mining. This third party paid Timingwallstreet Inc., $10,000 to produce and disseminate this and other similar articles and send traffic to them through paid advertising campaigns for 30-days from the date of this post (1/04/2020). This compensation should be viewed as a major conflict with our ability to be unbiased, more specifically: This communication is for entertainment purposes only. Never invest purely based on our communication. For more on trading risks read our policy statement by clicking here.

Source: Gold And Mining Stocks Give A Buy Signal – Mike Swanson (01/21/2021)

Yesterday Janet Yellen testified to Congress. No she didn’t do it as the Federal Reserve Chairman, but as the new head of the US Treasury. It seemed funny to see her back in action as if nothing has changed. We are getting used to the world we are in now in which interest rates are near zero.

She told Congress to “go big” on stimulus and not to worry about the US budget deficit, because it is simply necessary with so many people suffering and the US economy in tatters after last year. Stock market investors are used to the idea of rates being zero and the Federal Reserve has pledged not to raise them anytime soon, although it says it wants to see the inflation rate to get above 3%.

But if we step back from the daily news and look at the big picture on the charts it looks like we actually have seen a secular low in long-term Treasury bond yields last year – just as we saw a record low in oil prices (remember they went negative) and a secular turn in the price of commodities across the board.

Check out this chart of the yield on the ten year Treasury bond.

This is a chart that looks like a double bottom. That means that the natural trend for bond yields is to go up over the next few years, but the Federal Reserve cannot allow rates to go back to up to where they were in 2018 or 2019, because if they went that high then the country would basically go bankrupt, because the size of the debt has exploded.

And so last year the Fed Chairman Jerome Powell has talked about one day instituting “yield control” in which the Fed would buy long-term bonds to prevent these bond yields from going too high. That would be a program in which the Federal Reserve would buy Treasury bonds across the board at all durations necessary.

The day this happens this will be the defining event for the markets for the next decade and will cause the dollar to fall even more and the price of gold to rocket higher, because it is the movements in the dollar that most impact the price of gold, not Bitcoin. With the US dollar now working off an oversold condition after its sharp December drop, gold is trending sideways in a consolidation zone that it has been in since August, because of its volatility price structure.

Coming into this year I had assumed at some point we would see a correction in the stock market in the second half of this year that would come with it a decline in corporate bonds, which would cause the Fed to take action and increase their QE bond buying program and announce yield control.

This could still happen later, but it’s also possible though that it doesn’t take a sizable correction in the stock market to bring that about, but instead a simple rise in the ten year Treasury bond yield up to the 1.50-1.60% that causes the Fed to just do it.

It’s just a question of what takes us from here to the day that yield control begins. We can’t predict how things will exactly play out, but instead need to take one week at a time and see how the market trends unfold and change.

Here a closer look at the ten year Treasury bond yield on a one year chart.

On a short-term the bond yield is overbought with the RSI recently popping above 80. So it will likely take months for the yield to get into the 1.40% – 1.60% range.

BTW – the folks at Sonoro Gold, my top stock pick for this month, are going to run a live webinar tomorrow at 1:30 PM (PST). They will discuss the recent series of drilling & metallurgical results from the Cerro Caliche project site. After there will be a live Q&A session. To register click here.

-Mike

Disclosure: Mike Swanson owns shares of Sonoro Gold Corp. Because it is a small cap stock with a market cap of less than $100 million he has put himself in a trading blackout on the stock and will not buy or sell a share of it for at least 30-days from the date of this post. Wallstreetwindow.com, is owned by Timingwallstreet, Inc., which is being compensated by a third party (Leadgopher LLC DBA Pinnacle Ad Network) to conduct an investor awareness advertising and marketing campaign for Inca One Mining. This third party paid Timingwallstreet Inc., $10,000 to produce and disseminate this and other similar articles and send traffic to them through paid advertising campaigns for 30-days from the date of this post (1/04/2020). This compensation should be viewed as a major conflict with our ability to be unbiased, more specifically: This communication is for entertainment purposes only. Never invest purely based on our communication. For more on trading risks read our policy statement by clicking here.

Source: Have We Seen A Secular Ultimate Low In Ten Year Bond Yields? – Mike Swanson (01/20/2021)

Source: Interview: Gold, Silver, Bitcoin, Energy – David Skarica (01/22/2021)