Photo by Dmitry Demidko on Unsplash
 

Instead of the normal daily bar charts, let’s do something unusual and check out a much cruder granularity: annual bars. That’s right – – just a single bar to represent the billion things that take place inside a calendar year.

Below is the SPY going back for about eighty years. I have highlighted with rectangles two portions to make a particular point.
 

The point being: things have really changed. Look at the bars inside the red rectangle – – green, red, green, red, green, red. Sure, there are a few more green bars than red (meaning the close for the year was higher than the open), but there was at least a tug-of-war happening between bulls and bears, honestly representing the normal ups-and-downs of life (and business) that are sure to transpire.

The green rectangle, on the other hand, has been our living nightmare: a 17-year long bull market, with a puny 2 – – just two!!! – – years in which the market closed lower than it opened (and neither of those was especially dramatic). It blatantly illustrates that, on the heels of the last BIG red bars (2002 and 2008), the Fed learned its lesson and decided to crank as many trillions of bucks out of their money machine as necessary to keep equities (nominally) propped up.

Perhaps that has something to do with the fact that, again, on an annual basis, the gold and silver price charts should be making everyone’s hair burst into flames. This is NOT normal, and what it’s signaling is NOT worth celebrating (unless you own a bunch of the stuff).
 

When markets go haywire, life usually isn’t very far behind. Again, this is not normal, and what metals are telegraphing is something which, in retrospect, will send chills through all of society.

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