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Welcome to this week’s market wrap podcast. I’m Mike Gleason

Coming up, don’t miss our exclusive interview with Jordan Roy-Byrne, a chartered market technician and master of financial technical analysis, editor and publisher of The Daily Gold, and the author of the book Gold and Silver: The Greatest Bull Market Has Begun.

Jordan has a slew of interesting information and market analysis to share with us today, including why he believes the current gold market is more akin to the early 1970s, compared to the late 1970s, when the market topped out and then pulled back significantly – something many gold naysayers have been predicting of the period we’re in now.

Meanwhile, Jordan believes the metals may be overbought, but at the same time are also structurally underowned by mainstream investors, and how that dynamic may suggest further upside potential once the current consolidation plays out. Our guest this week also breaks down the notion of a “triple top” in the silver market and his take on whether we have in fact reached a top in the white metal.

Last month, Morgan Stanley CIO Michael Wilson suggested a seismic shift in investment strategy when he recommended a 20 percent allocation to gold. It appears investors are starting to take this advice to heart.

As we’ve discussed here a couple of times, historically, the conventional wisdom on Wall Street was a 60/40 portfolio, with 60 percent of the holdings in equities and 40 percent in fixed-income investments, primarily bonds. The theory is that these asset classes balance each other, with stocks strengthening in a strong economy and bonds creating a hedge during downturns.

Given changing market dynamics, Wilson said investors should consider a 60/20/20 strategy, swapping half of the bond portfolio for gold to serve as a “more resilient” inflation hedge.

Just days later, Sprott director of ETF management, Steven Schoffstall, echoed Wilson on CNBC, saying a 20 percent allocation to gold and silver will likely yield a better return than a traditional portfolio.

It appears investors have heard the message.

According to Wisdom Tree analysts, “a quiet revolution” is taking shape within investment portfolios because the traditional 60/40 model doesn’t work anymore.

“For decades, the 60/40 mix—60 percent equities, 40 percent bonds—was the shorthand for prudence, diversification, and balance. But the regime that made that formula work—low inflation, stable growth, and negative stock-bond return correlations—appears to have shifted.”

Bonds seem to have lost their safe-haven status recently. Last spring, at the height of tariff uncertainty, gold and silver rallied as bonds sold off. Gold and silver seem to be the last safe havens standing.

Wisdom Tree analysts say investors have noticed. Since 2022, there has been a growing number of people questioning how well bonds balance equity risk, and they are turning to gold.

And for good reasons. Gold is not just a store of value; it's a statement about the limits of paper promises.

In a world where the government relentlessly inflates the currency and destroys purchasing power, investors are losing faith in those paper promises. Morgan Stanley's latest Global Insights calls gold ‘an attractive hedge against fiscal largesse and geopolitics,’ noting its 50 percent rally year-to-date and near-zero equity correlation.

Historically, gold has fallen when long-term interest rates rise. The Wisdom Tree analysts said this dynamic has broken down in recent years because investors now perceive those higher rates as bearish. "What was once a rate-sensitive trade has become a fiscal-risk hedge. Correlations with Treasury yields have flipped from deeply negative to positive, implying that gold now rises with, not against, higher long-term rates when those rates reflect sovereign stress."

This shift is already evident in Europe. Wisdom Tree’s 2025 investor survey of investors in the EU and the UK show 41 percent identified gold as their preferred store of value, well ahead of both the dollar and Bitcoin.

And they are putting their money where their mouths are. According to Wisdom Tree, the average portfolio allocations to gold now stand at 5.7 percent in the EU, equal to holdings in developed-market sovereign debt.

The Wisdom Tree analysts emphasized investors aren’t just turning to gold to sidestep market volatility. They’re hedging against counterparty risk.

They're buying the only liquid asset that sits outside the liabilities of any government or central bank. Wisdom Tree called this “a profound shift” as investors realize “the architecture of portfolio resilience is changing." Instead of treating gold as an accessory to a portfolio, some strategists now treat it as a core sleeve of real assets.

While some may view the new 60/20/20 model as a radical break from traditional portfolio strategy, the Wisdom Tree analysts said it could be seen as “less a radical break than a quiet return to first principles: holding something that no one else owes you.”

In short, when it comes to the safety of an asset class and comparing the yellow metal to bonds, it seems that world is waking up to the idea that, quite simply, gold is just better.

Lastly, here, before we get to this week’s interview, let’s take a look at the weekly market action and check in on where we stand currently with a few hours left in the trading week.

The consolidation has continued here this week in the metals. Gold is down about $16 or 0.4% to come in at $4,082 an ounce. Silver has seen a decline of 75 cents or 1.5%, with all of that coming here today. The white metal currently trades at $50.03. Platinum is off 1% to check in at $1,537. And finally, palladium is down $30 or 2.1% and comes in at $1,393 an ounce as of this Friday, late morning recording.

Well, now, without further delay, let’s get right to this week’s exclusive interview. And for proper context, this conversation was recorded earlier this week.

Audio Length: 00:37:39

 

Mike Maharrey: Greetings. I'm Mike Maharrey and I'm joined today by Jordan Roy, by Jordan is the editor and publisher of The Daily Gold and a fine analyst of markets and really excited to have him with me today. How are you doing, Jordan?

Jordan Roy-Byrne: I'm great. Thanks for having me on, Mike.

Mike Maharrey: Absolutely. Well, it's always a pleasure. So, I want to talk a little bit just about kind of the trajectory of the gold and silver market. Gold corrected after hitting record highs in October, and I don't think the correction surprised anyone, but I don't think it was nearly as deep as a lot of people expected and it kind of rebounded quicker than at least I thought, and we seem to be holding support around $4,000. Was the shallowness of the correction and the speed of the recovery surprising to you?

Jordan Roy-Byrne: I would say a little bit, although I would say, I don't know if the correction is over. Corrections are function of price and time. Now interestingly, these corrections, sometimes you can do 90 or 95% of the price damage almost immediately, and then when there's a retest to market, it might make a slightly lower low, but basically the vast majority of the price damage can be done right away in these corrections and then they may require some months after that to consolidate and base out. So, I am looking for something like that. I would say yeah, the rebound, the strength of it surprised me a little bit. Although stepping back now we see that gold made a lower high. It's come back down now it's probably going to test, I mean it did bounce from $4,000 today (Tuesday). So, in the very short term, that'll be a question, is it going to hold above $4,000?

Again, whether it holds or not, that doesn't really bother me in the big picture. Same thing with silver. I mean, what was a little bit of a surprise is considering silver's rally after the correction was much stronger than gold's. So, that tells me in addition to other things that eventually we will see silver blast off above $50 and go to $60 and much higher than that. But here in the short term being in this correction, to me it's a good sign that we see silver stronger than gold. But in any event, I still think we need more time for things to play out here. I don't think we're about to see a leg higher here. I think it's going to take at least a couple more months.

Mike Maharrey: Yeah, that was actually going to be my next question. Do you think we're in for maybe a bigger correction or an extended period of consolidation? And you kind of spoke to that, but generally speaking, you're still bullish, long-term precious metals, correct?

Jordan Roy-Byrne: Absolutely, absolutely. I mean, there's no doubt about it. The market a month or so ago or in October, it just got really, really overbought, which is a good thing and it happens in secular bull markets, but we obviously hit an intermediate term peak based on multiple indicators. I mean, you look at the momentum, you look at history and where these moves go and how far they've gone and when they tend to correct and for how long, and that's what informs my thinking. And so in September and then October, all of the data that I was looking at was pointing to the high probability we would see some kind of a peak and then a correction for probably the intermediate term. Now the question is how much longer does this consolidation last? I mean some comparable corrections that I looked at in the seventies and then in the two thousands, I mean, you're around five months in terms of time.

So, right now we are a little bit more than a month into it. So I think that's the risk, the medium term risk here, it's not that prices are going to fall out of bed here. I mean, they could go lower. You could see the low forties in silver, in gold, you could see $3,700 possibly. But I think that the bigger risk, at least for bulls is this could take another three or four months, and that doesn't mean it goes down for three or four months. It just means it could retest the low, it could go a little bit lower, it could have a good rebound again, then it corrects, then it goes sideways. So, something like that could be what transpires over the next three or four months or so.

Mike Maharrey: Yeah, that's what we saw after the record in April. Right? We saw that sideways trading for most of the summer, really, and then we took off again in the fall. So yeah, that would not be unprecedented. You've made some correlations between looking at the big picture macro to what we're seeing today in the 1970s. Can you elaborate on that a little bit?

Jordan Roy-Byrne: Sure. Well, we're not quite into the 1970s yet. Well, let me stop for a second. As far as looking at the entire picture, stocks, bonds and gold, the three major asset classes using gold as commodities stocks and gold are in secular bull markets, which is really rare. The only other time that happened was in the mid to late 1960s, and interestingly, were in a new secular bond bear market. I use the total real return of bonds and the 80 month moving average. And when we've fallen below that in history, that puts us in a new secular bear. The only other time that happened was basically 1965 to 1982, so from 1920 to 2020, you made money in bonds. Bonds were in a secular bull market, so the fact that you have stocks and gold in a new secular bull or just not in a new secular bowl, but in a secular bowl, the only other time that happened was in the mid to late 1960s. And so again, that was the only other time compared to today where you had bonds going into a new secular bear. And by the way, in the mid to late 1960s, you couldn't buy gold. So, I'm using gold stocks as gold. That's basically what they were. Then if you wanted to buy gold in the 1960s, you wanted that inflation protection. You bought gold stocks basically.

Mike Maharrey: Right.

Jordan Roy-Byrne: So, looking at the major asset classes mid to late 1960s before the seventies is the best comparison. However, if we're looking cyclically at gold and silver, 1972 to 1973 fits really, really well. Gold's breakout in 1972, it was obviously somewhat artificial given that we were on the gold standard and the gold price was essentially held back in the previous five or 10 years. But nevertheless, that was in my opinion, the greatest breakout of all time in the history of capital markets in 1972, gold breaking out of a 100 year-long base going back to the Civil War when it peaked around $50 an ounce. So, gold took out that high, and the only other major breakouts in Gold's History, you had one in 2005, but that was not to a new all-time high. And then you had the one last March gold breaking out of a 13 year cup and handle pattern that was to a new all-time high.

And so, the best comparison for that in line with what happened in the early seventies, that puts us in 1973, somewhere in there with respect to gold. Now silver, interestingly silver in 1973, that's what it broke to a new all-time high. It actually took out its civil war high, which I believe was somewhere close to $3 or two 50 or something like that. So 1973 was when silver made its biggest breakout of all time. And what do you know now, silver, we're trading right around 50 bucks right now. It hasn't pulled away yet, but it's basically been flirting with a breakout here, and it's closed above 50 in daily, weekly, and monthly terms. So again, when we see silver break away from $54, $55, that would put it in line with 1973. So again, cyclically looking at the metals, the early seventies is the best case.

And another thing is if you look at the capital that's invested in precious metals right now, there was a tweet I referenced by Ronnie Stire a month ago or so, and he was quoting Bank of America Merrill Lynch, and they said that gold is structurally overbought but structurally under owned. And so in their portfolios, their allocation to gold, this was like a month ago, it was only 0.4%, or excuse me, I think in retail client portfolios the allocation to gold was 0.4%. Then for institutional money, which is obviously a much bigger deal, it was only I think 2.4%. So given how much gold and silver have moved over the last 18 months, it's shocking to see that data, that major capital and mainstream capital, it is totally under invested in precious metals. And that's kind of the dichotomy that we see right now is that precious metals are really overbought.

They need to correct it. That's a good thing, but they're still structurally under owned. There's not enough capital in this space. Just another statistic, if you look at the assets in gold ETFs relative to assets in all ETFs, 2011, 2012, that figure hit over 8%. The last I saw we're at 2% right now, and these facts are important. This data I should say is important because I see a lot of people saying, oh, we're in 1978 or 1979, we're going to have this big move higher, and that's going to be it. That does not make any sense. That does not align with the data. We're in the early seventies. We're in line with 1973 and eventually 1974 in the first part of that bull market where you did have an incredible cyclical bull market and you did kind of have a blow off in gold and silver to end that bull market. But people really need to know, and they really need to understand that this is not 1979. We're still in the early seventies, so I'm very confident about that.

Mike Maharrey: Yeah, that makes sense to me too. Even looking at kind of the trajectory of inflation and the borrowing and spending, we saw the 1960s, you had the spending ramp up for Vietnam, you had the social programs with the, what was it, the new deal, I can't

Jordan Roy-Byrne: Remember, guns and butter.

Mike Maharrey: All of that kind of thing. So, you had all of this spending, and you had all of this inflationary pressure in the system. We're seeing that today with 1.8 trillion budget deficit. So, that all kind of aligns really well. I think too, you make a point that people are maybe comparing it to the end of the seventies and thinking, well, maybe this is the end of the tail end of the bull market, but I don't think there's any Paul Volcker on the sidelines that's going to come in and hike rates to 20% either to tackle the inflation problem. So there's that aspect as well.

Jordan Roy-Byrne: Yeah, I mean you would, well, yeah, not to interrupt you, but it's just with the debt we have just impossible eventually this, not to get too far off topic, but eventually this secular bull market will probably end with gold being reintroduced into the monetary system. You're not going to raise rates to 20% and bankrupt everything. There's just too much debt.

Mike Maharrey: Yeah, absolutely. And my good friend Greg Weldon, who's another fine analyst who's on the show quite often, he talks a lot about what he calls the debt black hole and how this debt in the economy is impacting everything around it. Just like the gravitational pull of a black hole. It sucks everything into it. You have these dynamics. Let me ask you something from the perspective of a technical analyst, because that is definitely not my wheelhouse. We know that silver just broke out of a secular cup and handle, and that's typically bullish when you see that handle breakout, but I've heard other people say, oh, no, no, we have a triple top, which they're saying is bearish. So, how do you kind of balance those two kind of technical indicators?

Jordan Roy-Byrne: Triple tops are… it's a good question. There's really, there's no such thing as a triple top in technical analysis unless you have what's called a head and shoulders top or a head and shoulders bottom, that's when you tend to get a triple top or a triple bottom, but it looks more like a head and shoulders pattern. So pure triple tops really don't happen that often unless you have a double top. And then there's maybe a lower high that looks like it can be a third top. But yeah, I just saying it's a triple top. I mean, lemme step back for a second now. The short to medium term, you could have a double top and silver. So I could see that, and again, that aligns with my thought that metals here are probably going to consolidate for several more months. I think the risk would be, the bearish risk would be that silver, maybe it consolidates for five or six months here instead of three or four months.

I think that could be the potential risk. But the thought that there is some triple top, like in line with the 1980 and the 2011 peak, I don't agree with that whatsoever. I mean, I mentioned before silver in terms of its daily, weekly, monthly, and quarterly closes. It's already made new all-time highs across the board on all timeframes. So, that's significant. And as I just mentioned silver during this little correction so far, silver rallied back to its new high or rallied back to the old high it made in October, whereas gold did not. So that's a positive divergence. If silver were going to make some significant peak here, you would see a negative divergence. You would see silver underperforming gold on this rebound because then that would be a signal. And that's what usually happens in a week market. After gold and silver make a peak, then silver just falls out of bed relative to gold. So, we're not seeing that. We're seeing the opposite.

Yeah, so the issue with these patterns is that there's a lot of characteristics that go into these patterns that make it likelihood that that pattern will play out. And the problem now with most technical analysis and everything in the world now is everybody has a computer, everybody can look at charts, but they really don't. The attention span of society now is so short that they don't really look into things in detail. So, my point is there's specific characteristics that make these patterns real and likely to play out. And so with respect to silver being a triple top, I mean I mentioned it's not a triple top because it's not looking like a head and shoulders pattern. It's outperforming, it's outperforming gold during this correction, which is you don't see that in a weak market. So, with these patterns that people talk about, you'll see them post about on social media, 99% of their analysis they don't even look at what are the things that go into these patterns that make them that particular pattern. You mentioned the silver cup and handle before, and this is one thing that I've mentioned, it's actually not a cup and handle pattern. This is a really good example of that because if you look at gold's cup and handle pattern, that played out so beautifully because that was a real cup and handle pattern where you had the cup and then the handle correction part that only retraced 38% of the cup portion. Now what happened in silver is you have this huge 45 year base, but I'm going back to the last 15 years, so that's supposed to be the handle part of this massive cup. That was from 1980 to 2011. Yet if that was going to be a cup and handle pattern by the textbook definition, silver would've held above $32 and $33 an ounce.

It did not, so the handle actually failed. So by the definition here, silver is actually not in a cup and handle pattern. However, stepping back silver is in a big, beautiful, massive 45 yearlong base, which is just as bullish. So I don't mean to get on my soapbox, but I'm trying to make the point that with a lot of these patterns where people can throw, oh, it's a double top or it's a head and shoulders, and I've also heard people, because someone actually mentioned to me a couple of weeks ago, like silver is in a head and shoulders top, and I'm just looking at 'em like, what are they talking about? There's no head and shoulders top here for a head and shoulders top, you really need years and years of a strong market that moves up and then it makes this rounding top with it kind of looks like a triple top, and you don't see that at all in silver. It doesn't fit any of those characteristics of a head and shoulders top. So again, I don't mean to get on my soapbox here, but we just have to be careful when people are looking at a chart and they're just saying, ‘Oh, it looks like this. It's a double top, or it's a head and shoulders pattern, or it's a triple top.’ There's certain things that go into those patterns that make them those patterns, and that's what 99% of the analysis today doesn't look at.

Mike Maharrey: I'm really glad you got on that soapbox actually, because as I said, technical analysis isn't my thing. I'm more of a macroeconomics guy, so I'm looking more at just kind of the underlying bubbling things that are going on in the economy. And so it is somebody like me who's not well versed in the technical analysis. It's easy for somebody to show me a picture like the silver and it looks like a cupping handle to me. And I really appreciate that answer because it really helps kind of clarify how you really need to look at these with a lot more depth than just looking at the picture and kind of going by the image. So that's very, very helpful to me. And it kind of confirmed my instinct because the particular post that kind of brought this question on, they didn't even reference cup and handle.

They just said, oh, triple top still rallies over. So yeah, it's interesting and that's why I love talking to you because you have such a breadth of knowledge on this and the understanding of going back over time. And as you said, so many people get caught up in what happened in the last 30 seconds to ignore things that are relevant from years ago. So good answer. I'm going to shift bases a little bit here. You tweeted recently that gold is breaking out of a nearly two yearlong head and shoulder pattern versus Bitcoin. So I'm curious, what is this telling us?

Jordan Roy-Byrne: Well, so the chart that you're referencing is looking at gold divided by Bitcoin, and I did mention in the last answer where you have triple tops and triple bottoms. The ones that actually play out like that, they tend to be head and shoulders patterns where you have basically the middle part of the pattern is the biggest, and then you have the two shoulders that tend to be aligned. And then you have this neck line when you're looking at a bottom, for example. Then you have a neckline where you're looking for the market or the ratio to break above the neckline. But getting back to here and now is gold against Bitcoin has formed a head and shoulders bottom and it's breaking out of that neckline. And so what that means is you basically have, you can see on the chart going back to the last two years, you basically have three bottoms.

You have the first bottom, which is the shoulder, and that rallied up to a certain point. Then that went back, made a new low that was the head rallied up again, failed, and then came back down, but made a low. That wasn't a new low, it was a higher low, and then it started to rally again. And so then the resistance at that point, you're connecting where the previous two rallies failed. And so this ratio has broken above that point, and I think it made a new 52 week high in recent days. I know that Bitcoin and crypto is rallying today. It's been really oversold. But the bottom line is gold against Bitcoin has broken out of a clear bottoming pattern. And what that tells us in layman's terms is that gold should outperform Bitcoin moving forward. And that also with layman's terms, that means that we can see capital move out of Bitcoin and crypto and into gold.

Now, I'm not saying this is going to happen tomorrow, next week or even the next month or two, but the larger point here is this is a very, very bullish setup for gold relative to crypto. And I think this bottom could be one of a secular nature, like this bottom could indicate that we're going to see gold outperform Bitcoin and crypto for the next 5, 7, 10 years. And this is important because in a real gold bull market, and we've talked about this before, gold is outperforming other asset classes. Like earlier this year, gold broke out against the stock market. It broke out of a four and a half year long base. And what happened after that, we got another big leg higher because that breakout signals that capital is moving out of the stock market and into gold. And just like at the same time, I believe last or earlier this year in April, we had gold breaking out of a 10 yearlong base against the 60/40 portfolio.

And again, which indicates that capital is moving out of stocks and bonds and into gold. And so this chart telling us that gold has broken out against Bitcoin, it's made this really, really significant bottom that tells us again that capital is going to move out of crypto and Bitcoin and into gold. And so it's another feather in the cap of gold where that tells us that moving forward, okay, well now we're going to see capital from a different asset class move into gold, silver, and precious metals as a whole. And we did not have that in the last months. And so again, that's another feather in the cap of gold because it means moving forward before we get to the next leg higher, it's setting up for something really special because gold's outperforming bonds, it's outperforming the stock market now it's outperforming crypto and that's what's going to fuel, as I said earlier, potentially some mini blow off moves here in the next year or two years like we had in the early seventies into 1974.

Mike Maharrey: Yeah. What is your reaction to folks who say things like Bitcoin is just digital gold and they try to correlate those two assets as if they're kind of the same thing?

Jordan Roy-Byrne: I completely disagree. I mean, my buddy Vince Lancey, he did mention that he looks at gold or looks at Bitcoin as kind of risk on gold, whereas gold is risk off gold. So that's one way to think about it. But to answer your question or the point that people make, if you look at and you study markets going back a really long time, which is what I do, and with respect to Bitcoin and crypto, you go back to when it started in 20 10, 20 11, Bitcoin's run has basically mirrored that of tech stocks or the stock market. It's mirrored that of Nasdaq or the stock market. If you look at the biggest single years that the stock market has had in the last 15 years, Bitcoin, those were its best years as well. So there's many different ways you can look at it. You can look at the two charts together, you can run a correlation, but very big picture, Bitcoin and crypto.

Jordan Roy-Byrne: To me, it's not money, it's a technology, but just based on how it's trading, and not just in the last year or two, but again, this is the last 15 years when stocks have been in a secular bull market. Bitcoin and crypto has been in a secular bull market as well, and gold has traded differently. Yes, if you're looking at a particular month or the last 18 months or even one or two years, everything can be moving up together. But when you step back and you take a 30,000 foot view the way Bitcoin and crypto is traded, it's a technology. It's not money like gold and silver. So I'm not an expert in Bitcoin. I can barely explain anything to you about crypto beyond that. But the way it's trading and has traded again for over a decade makes it abundantly clear that it's trading like a tech stock. It's trading like a technology, not money.

Mike Maharrey: I agree with you 100%. That was my impression as well. I was just curious as to how you saw it as well. But definitely I've seen it as it almost seems to move more with the Nasdaq than with anything else, which again is kind of your technology stock sector. So alrighty. Well, I don't want to keep you too long, but before we go, I do want to give you the opportunity to let folks know where they can follow your work and avail themselves of your wisdom. So where can we find you?

Jordan Roy-Byrne: You can find at TheDailyGold.com. You can opt in there and get a free copy of my book, also my free newsletter if you're interested in investing in high quality juniors with big upside potential things that I'm investing in personally. You can sign up for the premium newsletter. I also have a YouTube channel. You can search the Daily Gold on YouTube. That's my channel. So I put out two or three videos a week and love to have people come aboard and join me.

Mike Maharrey: Yeah, absolutely. And you're also pretty active on X, formerly known as Twitter. It's a good feed to follow for folks out there. If you're not following Jordan, do that. Well, I really appreciate you taking a bit of time out of your day to chat with me and appreciate the insights that you provide. Like I said, I especially enjoy it because your knowledge base is outside of my wheelhouse, so I always feel like I learned something when I talk to you, and hopefully the folks that are listening did as well. So, thank you so much and I would love to have you on again sometime in the near future.

Jordan Roy-Byrne: Sounds good. Thank you so much for having me, Mike. I enjoyed it.

Mike Maharrey: Absolutely. Thank you.

Some pretty interesting analysis there from one of our regular guests, and I hope you enjoyed that as I did. We’ll see what the final few weeks of the year have in story for metals and metals prices and you can be sure we’ll be right here to break it all down for you, as we always do.

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