What happened to gold the last the last six months could best be called being shot out of the saddle. But is it dead? If you look closely, it could be crawling back into the saddle to continue the crazy ride of 2016. Gold has been a bit schizophrenic lately, not knowing if it's a bear or a bull. Although thought of as a dog since Trump's election, it actually has outperformed all the Trump commodities YTD and has trounced the Dow by almost double so far this year - seeming determined to disguise its true identity.

Back on Feb. 14, 2016 as gold was threatening to go on a tear from its long 4 year slide, I published an article here, at TalkMarkets, and at Seeking Alpha called "Gold's Bull/Bear Status". To understand this update, you need to go back and read this. The article correctly suggested a rampage upward in gold, which is what it did throughout most of 2016. But are we still in the large scale twin parabola fractal pattern that was the premise of the article? Gold has a very strong tendency to follow fractal patterns, as do a lot of big bull markets, as I illustrated in the article.

I drew a broad sweep diagram of this twin parabola fractal over a year ago that predicted last year's gold fireworks. Where are we on that map now?

I have added the black dot to update this as of April, 2017. Despite all the short-term schizophrenia of the last few months, in the bigger picture, gold seems to still be on track to do a roughly 2x scale up of the 1970s gold bull market. If we are to replicate the previous gold bull with its downtrend in the midst of the parabolic rises, we need to replicate this:

And so far we are doing this:

The two downtrends look similar in that there is churning against the resistance early on, then a sharp resignation to the downward move well below the resistance, then a return to churning on the resistance again, which is where we're at now. MAPS is what I call Moving Average Pairs for the 140 day and 200 day EMA that I find is a good separator of bull and bear moves. If GLD does a convincing break to 125-130 soon with high volume, a second parabolic rise starts to come into play.

But it is so hard to imagine gold going into a big bull market when its natural enemy, higher interest rates, are surely on the way. We seem to be going in the direction of all of gold's natural enemies - a good stock market, a defense of the dollar, an improving global economy, and a political sea change in Washington similar to the Reagan Revolution of 1981 that accompanied the death of the previous gold bull.

But gold can be very contrary to what it's supposed to be doing. For example, you can have bull markets in both stocks and gold at the same time, as in 2002 to 2007. In 1979, the year gold went ballistic in the last bull, the Dow was actually up 4.2%. And as for interest rates, if the last gold bull market is any indication, we should anticipate ramping gold alongside ramping rates:

The price of gold is very complicated and contrary, and maybe something like the science of fractals is the best guide to what it will do.