Well, last week I said to watch prices. This week, we saw prices explode higher, in virtually all of the commodities I track:
- Gold: +84.30 [+4.27%]
- Silver: +1.57 [+6.06%]
- XAU: +12.11 [+7.81%]
- Palladium: +626.27 [+26.97%]
- Crude: +21.76 [+19.22%]
- Copper: +0.43 [+8.76%]
- Lumber: +100.84 [+7.76%]
- USD: +2.15%
- EUR: -2.99%
- 10-year; -27 bp [to 1.70%]
Risk assets moved lower:
- SPX: -55.78 [-1.29%]
- JNK: -1.34%
Put simply, money fled Europe, to the buck, and into the 10-year, and – even more intensely – into commodities.
This week I’ll use gold/Euros. Given the very strong dollar rally this week, we need to add the big EUR/USD decline to the gold/USD rally to see what happened to gold/Euros. That adds up to a monster +7.67% weekly move for gold/Euros. You can see it below – gold/Euros broke out to a (checks notes) NEW ALL TIME HIGH this week. Wow. Big Money across-the-pond isn’t playing around.

Crude saw an even bigger move – up $21 to a new 11-year high. Another few pennies – we’d be looking at a 13-year high. This was an absurdly large move – the 4th largest weekly move on record. (The others: April 2020, Aug 1986, and Jan 2009). Anyone short got their clocks cleaned. I got an email from my broker talking about margin increases for crude oil futures. For me: now is the time for low stress trades. This is just too crazy. Even one single QM (500 bbl) crude future short would have resulted in a $10,500 loss this week. How many traders were blown up by this move? No idea.

And palladium – I already mentioned it was a monster move; the 5th largest weekly move on record. Notice the close right at the highs. That’s not a “peace is coming soon” indicator.

Copper broke out to a new all-time closing high on Friday also.

And here is the 10-year treasury. Look at the -27 bp drop, and that bearish reversal candle. What’s that about? Rumor has it, the Fed won’t need to raise rates, what with all the chaos from “war with Russia!” going on.