I'd like to post a correction. In the BPMF data, I was going by some charts that are part of a switchover to the FOLIOfn website and they were showing some incorrect data. The YTD figure is +10% and one year is +32% and 5 year is +35%. Since inception is correct.

You said:

"The timing of this next golden cross depends on how fast gold keeps advancing and thus dragging its 50dma higher. Its 50dma could cross back over its 200dma within a couple weeks at best, or a couple months on the outside. Either way, that big technical event is going to really accelerate the shift in prevailing gold sentiment"

But if you look at the exponential moving averages (50/200) you see that a "golden cross" has already happened several days ago. Exponential moving averages weight more recent prices higher and thus tend to catch major trend changes earlier. If you look at how this behaved in the early 2016 breakout of gold, you see that the exponential 50/200 cross occurred in mid February while the simple cross was early March.

As a fine point of terminology, I'd like to point out the difference between "Stephens, Inc." and "Stephens Group", the creators of Alltel, Bear State, and other enterprises. Sometimes "Stephens Group" is used to describe Stephens in general, but actually Stephens, Inc. is the investment banking arm, which helped form Alltel, Wal-Mart, and others, while Stephens Group, which does other business formation activities, is what is helping with the formation of Bear State. They are two separate entities.

Everybody loves to hate the chicken scratching study (chart reading) and you have to have some faith in the efficient market theory to not feel silly doing it. I also have some faith in fundamental analyses, and cash flow and revenue value and patterns enter into my thinking. But honestly, I feel that fundamental screens, and looking for good vs bad areas of the market just provide a universe of buys that improve your odds with technical analyses.

The efficient market theory forces you to admit that, no matter how much you read and know, the market is a composite of more reading and knowing than any one person can muster. Of course, any idiot can digest facts and come up with a buy/sell opinion. But consider this. A mindless, well informed idiot making a trade is just as likely to be wrong bearish or bullish - its a coin flip since he's an idiot. Well, thousands of coin flips cancel each other out, and what you have left is just the well thought out conclusions with more good minds and information than you or I can accomplish on our own!

The result of all this thought and buy/sell action is right there on your chart. You have to respect it. I look more at trends than valuation or reactions to headlines. You can disagree on the market's valuations or headline knee-jerk moves. But a trend will more consistently show you the future and is the result of all the market's work for you.

The click to enlarge feature isn't working on the charts. After Monday night, I will have this article at Good Stock Investing and you can view the enlarged charts there.

Your 12 month moving average chart is especially telling. If you look at the times when the slope turned negative with the amount of margin money anywhere near a new high, you see it has happened just twice over the last 20 years (before now) - just in front of the massacre of 2002, and just in front of late 2008.

Rich people don't spend on things that are necessarily more important, just different. The point is, all this spending doesn't effect an economic cycle. All the Fed efforts of the last 5 years amount to about 3.5% of total consumer spending on a yearly basis. That transient amount probably isn't changing a basic cycle. And if they replace the Fed debt creation money with helicopter money (which they maybe should have done in the first place), it would be a massive amount and it would probably not do much differently than the Fed money as far as fundamentally fixing the economy.

helicopter money:

Taking all the debt creation measures of the Fed so far the last 10 years and dividing it by the number of households in the US, you get some $21000 per household. That was given to Wall Streeters, they bought Mercedes, yachts, and Rolexes with it. That temporarily benefited the makers of the yachts and then we have the same old zero growth economy suffocating in taxes to pay for all the central planning.

If the helicopter changes its targeting away from the 1% to the 99%, you would have another 10 years, only this time the $21000 would be spent on bars, casinos, cigarettes, video games, cock fights, and vacations to Las Vegas. Studies have found that after the last episode of check mailing from the government to fix the economy, the January, 2008 stimulus checks, it raised nondurable spending the next quarter by 2.4%. One study found that about half of that, 1.1% went to increased emergency room visits for alcohol and narcotics related issues. And it did wonders to avert a recession, didn't it? A new helicopter blast would temporarily benefit Las Vegas and then we would have the same old zero growth economy suffocating in taxes to pay for all this brilliant central planning.

You have to wonder what kind of confidence build would transpire if the Fed turns from interest rate normalization to the check mailing. In 2008, those checks were a message from our government saying, "the economy is in deep trouble and we don't know what to do". Now after many years of complicated monetary maneuvers, if they do any check mailing again, the message would be, "We are clueless as to how to really fix the economy". All the confidence based activity (hiring, taking on loans, planning of all sorts) could be very badly influenced.

Also, I guess I should disclose that I am long gold in general with some gold miners and a royalty company.

OK, the google brings up the Seeking Alpha copy - the chart enlarges nicely there, too. It was bringing up the blog article earlier when I was doing some checking.