00:00 Miles
wrapping up what’s been an eventful week of trading. I think when all the dust settles, we take a look at where the major averages are. Uh going to be not a whole lot going on. Yesterday’s action though, quite interesting. Of course, followed it here on Yahoo Finance during the Thursday’s trading session. But join us now to talk about the week that was, Jared Blikre stopping by. Jared.
00:20 Jared Blikre
Thank you. It has been quite the eventful week. Dow Jones earlier this week, I remember saying two record highs in a row, and then we kind of fell off a little bit. This is a five-day view. So we got to the peak on Wednesday around the open or Tuesday close, and it’s been downhill since there. But you see, we’re still ending up with gains of about 1/3rd of 1%.
00:53 Jared Blikre
Now, here’s the NASDAQ, that is ending in the red for these five days, so down about half a percent. S&P 500, which lost about 5/10 or 5/100, so just five basis points, barely in the green there. So really not a lot of action if you look at the weekly chart from the close last week, but under the hood, we’re seeing a lot here Miles.
01:09 Miles
Go ahead.
01:10 Miles
Yeah, well let’s talk about the themes of the week. Um, and let’s just start, you you mentioned here the technical side of it, and I saw more flash headlines this week about technical level this, technical level that than I can remember. And it feels like we’re in that market environment where maybe the Bulls aren’t in total control, but the bears can’t assert themselves either.
01:34 Jared Blikre
That’s a good way to put it. And let’s start with the 50-day moving average because that was the key level that was in play. I saw a lot of headlines and basically that has been in flux. Let me just give you a year-to-date chart here and I can put the 50 day right on the Wi-Fi interactive. There we go. And you can see how we are touching it right now. In fact, we were touching it yesterday when we were doing our invest seminar with and we had a segment with Kenny Polcari and he
02:04 Jared Blikre
was noting that we are still just perched right above it. And let’s listen to what he had to hear, uh, say about it.
02:11 Kenny Polcari
What you see is that the S&P remains above it. It keeps kind of testing it, never really kissing it or piercing it, uh but it’s testing it. What you want to look for is right now where you can see we’re just about to kiss the trend line. And what’s going to be important in that is does it hold or does it fail? If it fails, here’s what typically happens. You get the algos that will kick in because we’ve had a technical failure on the chart and then you’ll get the algos that just operate based on a mathematical formula
02:34 Kenny Polcari
that will see that there’s a failure and they’ll go into sell mode.
02:37 Jared Blikre
Yeah, what I love about that and I’ve dialed this down to a two-month chart with candlesticks, you can see if you squint that we pierced it twice. That was a week ago last Friday and today, but we have closed above it. So the algos did not get that closing low below it. And so, uh, maybe a little short covering rally intraday here, but, you know, par for the course.
02:54 Miles
Yeah, and essentially, the way that I always think about the 50 day is let’s call it the short-term, it’s a short-term direction of the market overall, right? So the trend right now on a short-term basis, based on what we’ve seen, remains higher. All right, what else we got for this week?
03:09 Jared Blikre
All right, we got to take a look at the VIx because that was spiking higher earlier today. Uh, I think we settled right around the 20 level. Let’s see what the high actually was and I believe it was 23. So here is again, a two-month chart and this is pretty good here. This was the China scare from a few weeks ago. That was a Friday afternoon thing. and you don’t see, you know, in the grand scheme of things. This is not a big move, but I would say that this is a trend of higher highs and higher lows. And so that is an uptrend and we are still in the season when the VIx tends to spike. It’s not just October, but also November.
03:41 Miles
And so again, the thing with the VIx is it doesn’t necessarily say whether stocks are going up or down, but it does say that the volatility of the market is on the move higher and generally, in the short term, that has tended to be associated with, you know, more negative momentum, you know, in some of these time frames.
04:02 Jared Blikre
And what Steve Saznick likes to say is that the VIx is not a fear index, but it’s a 30-day gauge of institutional hedging pressure. And so they were definitely, you know, that doesn’t roll off the tongue
04:16 Miles
I’m always, I’m always walking around thinking about my gauges of institutional selling pressure. All right, last thing for today.
04:21 Jared Blikre
Yeah, we got to get to crypto because Bitcoin 95,000. This has been a, I don’t want to call it a stair step down because it hasn’t been that orderly. But as I like to say, Bitcoin really known for its fake outs to the upside and to the downside over these five days, it’s down 11%. Let me just show you a six-month chart here because we got a head fake to the upside. looked like we were breaking out then boom, came down and this has been a textbook downturn. The sellers have come in exactly where they should have and my key levels here are 105 to 110. That’s where the the sellers would re-emerge again and then above 115, that’s when they have to scramble.
04:57 Miles
Can we also look at Bitcoin on a longer term? I’m thinking two-year time frame and specifically that because something that you put in our chat earlier today is that at one point this morning, Bitcoin had wiped out its gains for 2025. I believe at 944, we’re still positive for the year, but that’s going to be one of these psychological. I mean, look at that. So basically, we started this year at exactly where we sit today.
05:22 Miles
Now, again, calendars are arbitrary, Bitcoin trades 24/7. But just as you think about um, any kind of major asset on the scale that Bitcoin is now within the context of, you know, big portfolios going from being, you know, up 20%, okay, future is here, genius act, all this stuff. I mean, you got nothing for Bitcoin this year.
05:40 Jared Blikre
And let me show you another thing here. This is how much each of these coins are down from their 52-week highs. And you can see Bitcoin down 25%, Ethereum down 36%, Solana 52, Cardano’s in there somewhere down 60%. So Bitcoin is actually one of the least dirty shirts in the laundry basket here. It is really a different story for a lot of these coins right now.
06:01 Miles
Yeah, it’s interesting. I mean the more that Bitcoin starts to become just an institutional asset, uh, the more it’s going to look, I don’t know, like gold or like tax it’s basically like the levered, slightly levered NASDAQ right now and it’s really divorced on a price basis from from its uh smaller peers over here.
06:18 Jared Blikre
What I would love to see is if Bitcoin can figure out what it wants to be correlated to long-term because it just switches all the time. Sometimes it’s stocks, sometimes it’s gold, sometimes it’s an inflation hedge and sometimes you just got to hole it.
06:30 Miles
All right, we’ll leave it there. Jared Blikre, thanks so much for the update.
