MacroVoices #472 Lyn Alden: Navigating Headline Driven Markets
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This is Macro Voices, the free weekly financial podcast targeting professional finance, high net worth individuals, family offices, and other sophisticated investors. Macro Voices is all about the brightest minds in the world of finance and macroeconomics telling it like it is, bullish or bearish, no holds barred. Now, here are your hosts, Eric Townsend and Patrick Ceresna.

Macro Voices episode 472 was produced on March 20th, 2025. I'm Eric Tenzend. Lynn Alden returns as this week's feature interview guest. We'll discuss everything from what's next for the stock market to international diversification strategies to energy, gold, Bitcoin, and more. I'll also have an update from Patrick in our postgame segment on hedging strategies using options.

And I'm Patrick Ceresna with the Macro Scoreboard week over week as of the close of Wednesday, March 19th, 2025. The S&P 500 index was up 136 basis points trading at 5675. A market bounce is underway, but the question is, is it just a bear market rally? We'll take a

closer look at that chart and the key technical levels to watch in the postgame segment. The U.S. dollar index down 11 basis points, trading at 103.47. The May WTI crude oil contract down 115 basis points to 66.91. The price action remains weak and distributive along those 52-week lows.

The May Arbob Gasoline contract up 93 basis points to 217. April Gold contract up 337 basis points trading at 3,041. We decisively cleared 3,000. So what is next?

Copper up 537 basis points, trading at 510, trading up along 52-week highs. The uranium contract up 236 basis points, trading at 6505, the first time we've seen an uptick in weeks. And that U.S. 10-year treasury yield down six basis points, trading at four and a quarter. The key news to watch next week is we have the European and U.S. manufacturing and services PMIs.

the US GDP, and the Core PCE Price Index. This week's feature interview guest is Lynn Alden. Eric and Lynn discuss the macro environment, impact of Trump on volatility, international rotation, and the global monetary system. Eric's interview with Lynn Alden is coming up as Macro Voices continues right here at MacroVoices.com. Macro Voices

And now with this week's special guest, here's your host, Eric Townsend.

Joining me now is Lynn Alden, founder of Lynn Alden Investment Strategy. Lynn, it's great to get you back on the show. It's been too long. Let's get into what's on everybody's mind right now, which is, wow, big correction on the S&P markets generally. As we've seen, what is at least a relief rally, a bounce up to almost the 200-day moving average. The rally stopped right at the volume level.

weighted moving average or volume weighted average price, as some people call it. We've seen as we're recording here on Tuesday afternoon, Tuesday was a little bit of a down day. Does that mean the selling is about to resume and we haven't seen the bottom yet? Are we just stumbling here? What do you think is happening? What's driving this? What's the big picture behind it? Well, thank you for having me back. Always happy to be here. And when I kind of focus on what I think is

you know, expectations around the equity market. I focus more on do I think it's going to have a decent year or a bad year or even a decent two to three years or not a very good two to three years. I try not to draw the line on individual levels. I leave that to the professional traders because that's a hard enough

profession, even for those that focus 100% on it. And so it's nice that there's a little bit of a near-term bottom here and we put the end to lower highs. I don't have a conviction on what happens in the next few weeks. I've been making the case... We've entered more of a headline-driven market. So the past couple of years were more of a mechanical liquidity-driven market where things tended to trend.

until they didn't. Whereas the headline driven market, quite big turnarounds can happen pretty quickly. So I think that if kind of the current period of policy uncertainty continues, so if we don't get more visibility on tariffs, yes or no, and retaliatory tariffs, yes or no, and some of the questions around doge and fiscal, then it's certainly possible that this could bleed lower. But I generally have a view that

large cap US indices are just not super attractive here in a risk reward basis. So I expect chop in general. That could be chopping to slightly lower lows. It could be being range bound for a period of time, don't really have conviction. But I do find kind of other areas to be more investable and more interesting at the current time.

I definitely want to come back to those other areas that are more interesting, but first let's go a little deeper on this headline driven markets. I very much agree with, uh, with that description. What's your take on why it's headline driven? Is it because of the Trump administration, which let's face it, some people love him, some people hate him, but he's, uh, definitely no shortage of headlines coming out of, uh, president Trump. Is that why you're saying it's a headline driven market? Are you talking about something else? Well,

Well, so I would say at the moment, yes, it's a Trump-driven, headline-driven market. But that's different than saying that just because Trump's in office, it's a headline-driven market. So, you know, in one of my recent reports, I highlighted...

that, you know, in 2018 and 2019, it wasn't really a headline driven market too much, even though Trump was in office. And so it's not to say that we're necessarily in a headline driven market for the next four years, just to say that in the current part of the Trump administration, because they kind of entered with a shock and awe approach, um,

it is more of a headline-driven market for those political reasons. In Trump's first term, his opening cabinet was kind of a mix of establishment and some anti-establishment figures, whereas this one has been more unified around more anti-establishment figures that kind of come in and basically give us more headline volatility risk. And like you said, people can be on either side of that, but it is volatile. And so because this has been more of a shock and awe starter,

We are in more of a headline driven market, but that could be a six month thing. It could be a 12 month thing. It's not necessarily some four year thing.

Let's go a little bit deeper on what's going on here with the Trump driven headline market, particularly around the role of the judicial system that's starting to intervene the way I think, as you said, the Trump administration caught everybody by surprise with this shock and awe approach, making huge policy changes, kind of just blew everybody away.

I've noticed just in the last week or so that we're finally starting to see what seems to me like very organized resistance coming from the judicial branch. First, there was one federal judge who didn't even have anything before his court, but took a

took it upon himself to issue a ruling basically prohibiting the Trump administration from deporting the Trende Aragua people. The judge actually tried to call for planes that were in flight to be returned to the United States.

Trump administration set up. That's out of your jurisdiction. Those flights are in international airspace. We refuse to do it. Now we've got Democrats saying the president should be impeached for that. Republicans saying the judge should be impeached for that. People are talking about impeachments. You know, this is this is getting bigger. And then I just see on Tuesday a different judge also appointed by President Obama found that Elon and Doge president.

violated the Constitution by shutting down USAID and has basically ordered them to restore access for the remaining employees, let them go back and put it back together, it sounds like. Seems like the resistance to Trump shock and awe is starting to get organized. Would you agree with that? And if so, what does that mean to markets in this whole thesis that we're in a headline driven market? Does it mean it's about to get

Less headline driven as this resistance comes in or to get more headline driven as the Trump administration resists the resistance? I wouldn't say it's going to be not a headline driven market. So I would either err toward that level of headlines continues roughly as is, including that retaliation or potentially upticks.

I don't think we're necessarily close to leaving a headline-driven market yet. Because should those things go through, I think there will be pushback in trying to find different legal approaches that they have. We can kind of broadly separate this into three different buckets just because it's a complicated enough question in and of itself. So one of the buckets is tariff policy. That's one of the big uncertainty points for markets, both

from a business capex standpoint, if you're looking to deploy capital, all else being equal, you might hold off a little bit until you have more clarity. And then from an investor perspective, if you're kind of trying to judge the future performance of companies, you might be a little more conservative again until you have more clarity on margins and things like that. It's also the tariff policy kind of messes up certain economic data. So as entities...

front run imports. We can get kind of like wonky readings on like the Atlanta Fed or trade balance information and things like that. So that's kind of a noisy headline market there, both for the actual economy as well as for markets. The second big bucket would be Doge or anything fiscal related.

A big part of my macro thesis long term has been fiscal dominance, the fact that we're kind of structurally running higher fiscal deficits. That doesn't mean that every single year goes up. There could be periods of consolidations or attempts to rein that in. I've made the case that the Gordian knot there is extraordinary.

extremely, it's tied very in a complex way. And so including the political pushback that's part of it, there's a bunch of levers that have to be done in order to meaningfully reduce the deficit. So one, generally speaking, you have to be able to cut not just these optical things. So there are some things that are politically charged, like the stuff we've seen, but it's a small part of the pie chart. The really big chunks of the pie chart, fiscally speaking, are Social Security, Medicare,

defense, interest expense, veterans benefits, which we could kind of lump in with defense. These are very challenging things to cut and they represent the vast majority of not only the budget, but that they expected budget growth over the next five years. And so the big question is, can they actually make a dent in any of those? And for example, on the defense side, I pointed out

Every single congressperson who has some sort of defense thing in their jurisdiction, they're going to push back on that specific thing because they might say, yeah, we want to trim defense, but not that thing. That's in my area.

And so that's the kind of the pushback there. And then like you pointed out, if they try to go around certain things, if they try to push forward with certain things, then you can get legal pushback as well. So it's not an easy thing to do. And then the final aspect there, and this is something that I've touched on and Luke Roman has touched on and others, is that the U.S. is more financialized than the average developed market, which is to say that our tax receipts are more correlated with asset prices and especially equity prices than many other markets.

And that's partially because we have higher wealth concentration. It's partially because of the way we structured our tax code. It's partially because we have so much global capital kind of stuffed into our markets. But for a bunch of reasons, if you attempt some sort of austerity, even if you're moderately successful on the spending side, and then the result is that asset prices chop along sideways or go down for a while, then with a lag, that can come back and hurt your tax receipts and make it hard to reduce the deficit from that direction.

And so that's part of the Gordian knot that's very difficult to untie. So that's kind of that second bucket. And then the third bucket is immigration. And that has implications for the labor market. I guess out of the three, that'd probably be the area where I expect them to have more success, defining that as their objectives, which is to reduce illegal immigration. I'm not so sure how much raw numbers they're going to end up

deporting, given the millions we're talking here. But I do think at the very least that the borders will be more tightly secured and that that does have implications for the labor market. So I tend to take the under on fiscal. I tend to take immigration a little bit more at face value. And the tariff side is still kind of a big wild card.

Let's come back to, you alluded earlier, you've got other ideas instead of U.S. equity markets to maybe step away from all of this volatility into something that might make a little more sense. What are those other assets that might make more sense and what's the rationale for them?

Well, so I've been taking the idea of an international rotation pretty seriously, like a US to international performance shift. And I don't take that lightly because out of the various trends that I've followed,

that's the one that I found to be the hardest personally. And so, for example, I was on the right side of the fiscal dominance trend. I was on the right side of being a structural bond bear and wanting a slice of gold in my portfolio instead of bonds, right on the Bitcoin area. But the part that I've... It's been somewhat of an anchor on my portfolio compared to those other ones

has been either the idea of a growth to value rotation or a US to international rotation. So these things that have tended to persist longer than I've expected. Part of that

is that there's certain windows where the rotation can happen because the rotation tends to be self-reinforcing. As, you know, US does well, it's running kind of hotter fiscal. So it's kind of stimulating more. That attracts a lot of global capital that wants to come in. The stocks do well. That's beneficial for the wealth effect. That dries up the dollar, which then suppresses the kind of liquidity on emerging markets.

that they run into both financial problems and economic problems and then investors don't want to be there. So they pop more into the U.S. and it kind of is this flywheel that becomes self-reinforcing. And either due to sheer exhaustion and extremes or due to major policy shifts, that flywheel can go in the other direction.

It's still too early to say if that's happening. But the way that I've been describing it is there are certain windows where that becomes much more probable than other periods of time. And so the reason I started looking at this window was last year with the rate cuts, the

So when the Fed kind of ended their tightening cycle, they were flat for a while. And then around the margins, they've been starting a little bit more of a dovish approach. That I described as the first window since 2019 that we have a rate cutting cycle. And that doesn't mean that there's going to be follow through, but it's basically an opening where other markets do have an opportunity, especially given valuation differentials and that whole kind of recursive flywheel effect.

to start doing well. In 2019, and this is where I say I was premature on it, I did expect that rotation to be a little bit more meaningful after the 2019 rate cutting cycle. And one of the things that really short-circuited that whole concept was the lockdowns, COVID and everything, because going into that whole mess, it's better to be the reserve currency. And also the US did a lot more fiscal. And so it kind of came out hotter compared to places like China that were more focused on

kind of right-sizing some of their housing market balance sheet stuff and things like that, as well as Europe. And so this is like the first window. So there's certainly curveballs that could prevent that rotation. But I am taking a rotation concept pretty meaningfully, especially given some of the prior points that

If around the margins, if the U.S. does kind of consolidate on a fiscal, at least a little bit, while at the same time you have Europe opening up fiscally, not necessarily for good reasons, but still opening up fiscally. And then you have China, where since last year, I've been kind of pointing out that

While I don't expect any sort of hyper stimulus from them, their policymaker risk reward assessment has certainly shifted. Last year, there was noise on social media in China about it being garbage time. So in sports, if one side is winning so thoroughly, both sides are winning.

both sides will generally take out their best players to avoid injury. Because if you're winning so bad, you don't care about winning more. And if you're losing so bad, you know you're not going to win. And so your main thing is just, okay, we don't want our key players to risk getting injured in a meaningless game. So they take out their best players and then that's just a garbage game now. And so there was Chinese social media...

chatter calling the economy garbage time. And that reached a little bit of a fervor. And we started to see a policy shift, basically, when Chinese equities were considered so uninvestable that

the Chinese policymakers started to say, well, we actually want these stocks to go up again. Maybe we want to stop going after them and start stimulating them a little bit. Same thing with households. China got really imbalanced toward the export and industrial side, really weak on the consumption side. And around the margins, they keep providing a little bit of stimulus here and there, which again, it's nothing really to write home about. But when you see things change on the margin...

at such cheap levels. My view has been that China has some legs to it. Obviously, it's run a little bit. But I do think that there are pockets of international investment out there. And I do think that this flywheel could change. And I say that fully knowing that this has been somewhat of a widowmaker for 10 years. So it's something I'm watching pretty humbly.

Let's go a little deeper on that subject. I certainly understand and appreciate your arguments for why an international rotation. The problem I'm having is that my concept of international markets is changing day by day because, well, you've got the countries that are well-developed nations that the United States has a very strong geopolitical alliance with, such as Western Europe. Oh, wait a minute. No, I just read the headline. We're in a big...

spat with Western Europe. Maybe we don't want to be friends again. You know, how do I analyze Western Europe? Well, they don't really have a defense industry because they don't need one. Oh, wait a minute. Maybe they do need one because the U.S. might not be supporting them, except maybe that's a bluff and maybe it's all about to change.

So how do I think about that? When you say international, do you mean things like European markets or do you mean emerging markets, places like Vietnam and Malaysia and so forth? What is I think about the world landscape? It's all changing so quickly. Alliances between nations are changing so quickly. Which international markets do I want to invest in?

Yeah, it's a good question. So back in 2020, I started writing more about that I think the world is moving in a multipolar direction. And that's only been accelerated by Russia's invasion of Ukraine and then the current administration's approach, even with its own allies. And so I think that basically there's a handful of big blocks

in the world that the world's gradually separating into. And they can be analyzed on their own merits. Before recently, I was broadly internationally bullish, but less so on Europe because I think they have more structural issues. So I was increasingly optimistic on China at their uninvestable low points. I do like certain other emerging markets. I've been

Brazil is always tough, but I've been less bearish on Brazil than probably the average consensus is. There are certain parts of the market that I don't mind playing in, despite numerous risks there. You mentioned Malaysia and Vietnam. I do like Southeast Asia in general. So those are some of the markets that I've tended to like. I've also been somewhat of a bull on Japan for years now. That's been doing okay. And so...

pretty broad swaths of the market. Europe, I was more reticent on for quite a while. The recent defense shift could address that, could change that, but it's still not a part of the market that super excites me, although I do have exposure. So I would like to see it turn less into an anchor and more of a booster. But so I would say that broad international interests me, but with certain areas that maybe more so than others.

Let's talk a little bit more about Bitcoin and its role in the global monetary system. You know, my argument always used to be, look, there's just no way that major existing governments are going to cede their money.

their stranglehold or their monopoly over control of the world's money systems. They get a lot of power from being in charge of money. They're never going to give it up. Well, I definitely did not foresee this populist movement starting with the Trump administration, but I don't think it stops there. I think the UK Reform Party is now in the lead in the UK. Maloney's party in Italy, it

It seems like there's a big populist movement to where more and more governments might actually support the way the Trump administration is supporting this idea of making bitcoins the favored central bank reserve asset at some point. Is that where you see this headed? Is that a reason for a new wave of optimism around bitcoin? What do you think? I certainly think that contributed to the recent rally where it jumped from, you know, the

70 something thousand to briefly over 100K and now it's corrected. So I think that that has been relevant. One of my thesis for a while is that the network effects here are relevant because the government's not a monolith. Government, as you point out, I mean, there are judges contesting the existing administration. Government has multiple parts, multiple different perspectives in Congress, multiple different perspectives in any given part of the government. And so I've been of the view that while

government's probably not going to roll over and just say, yeah, we're going to make it legal tender and everything kumbaya, that there are political realities when you reach a certain scale. And certainly, I think we've seen in this election cycle, there's almost nothing to be gained for an elected official at being anti-Bitcoin or anti-crypto or whatever. There's very few votes that they were not going to get that they're going to get because they took that position. Whereas there are plenty of people that are either single issue voters or they were on the fence that

that when someone comes out and is in favor of the space, they will go out of their way to vote for them or give them a lot of capital and lobby with them for almost just saying, we don't even want anything from you. Just leave us alone. And also, if you want to do a couple of nice things, that'd be good too. And so it is a pretty big political force, both in the US and globally, when we're talking about a one and a half to two trillion dollar Bitcoin network and then

stablecoins and everything else as well. And so I think that's been relevant. I think it shows some of the game theory here. And I think that it is probably healthy that it corrected off some of the euphoria that we were seeing a few months ago. But I'm still structurally bold on the space. When we look globally, it's interesting because, you know, for a long time, we've been hearing about all the BRICS nations want like...

non-dollar payment systems. Then they quibble about how they're going to build it. They're trying to build this closed thing. There's all sorts of imbalances. So for example, if Russia, if India buys arms from Russia in rupees, then what happens is Russia ends up with more rupees than they know what to do with. And they don't necessarily want to invest that all back into India. It doesn't really have the depth of capital markets that say the dollar has. And so there's this kind of piecemeal solution out there

And what's interesting is that all along, there's this open source settlement network that's out there. There have been kind of these entities debating, well, we want to do this, but I don't know if we should have Russia in it because the sanctions and is there a way to exclude them? And then does that defeat the purpose of the whole project to begin with?

Meanwhile, Bitcoin's this open source network that's pretty large and has 16 years of functionality. And it didn't really, it couldn't really be on the radar until it went to like a trillion dollar market cap, more or less, or you can measure it other ways like daily liquidity and things like that. But now it's at the scale that it's,

at least that the margin's relevant. There was a recent Reuters headline that sources say that Russia is using some of these things for like oil settlements with China and elsewhere. Who knows how true that is? We have a lot of occasional reports like that. But basically, given the slow movement of other alternatives and given the existence of an open source one, not just as an investment asset, but as an actual payment network for like large international payments,

It's not irrelevant. And then especially if it continues to solidify and kind of get a little bit bigger from here and a little bit more liquid from here, it is a non-trivial thing for global trade or global settlement, especially for countries that are on the wrong side of dollar hegemony. So combination of bilateral trade agreements and then the existence of these things is pretty relevant.

Lynn, let's talk about gold, which you mentioned earlier that you've advocated for some time that people have some gold in their portfolio. I couldn't agree more. But boy, nothing ever goes in a straight line in markets. And gold has been going in a straight line up for quite a while now. I'm starting to get a little bit worried about it feeling kind of top heavy. What do you think?

So I agree with you. I've been a five-year structural bond bear. And at certain levels, I just can't help be less bearish than I was before. So I'm less bearish on bonds at 4%, 4.5% or 5% than I would be back when they were gilding almost nothing after such a terrible period of underperformance on them.

And at the same time, as bullish as I am on gold, I'm less bullish to some extent on $3,000 than I was at $1,500. And so I'm still structurally bullish on gold. I'm kind of mindful of the fact that, for example...

during the 2010s tech run, even when, you know, back before they called it the Mag7, the popular name back then was the Fang stocks. And the Fang stocks kept running longer and higher than any of the most people thought, including myself for a while. So I'm kind of, I try not to

cut myself short by saying, okay, I'm structurally bullish on something, but I'm going to be jittery too often. I tend to let things run. But for me, it's more about setting expectations. That when someone comes to me and says, should I buy gold? I say, well, I mean, it's up 40% year over year. So I would only buy it if I'm willing to accept that it could go nowhere for two years. It could have a 20% correction. It could give up half of its recent run. And so I'm less bullish on it than I was when it was...

less overbought. But as a slice of my portfolio, I don't really lose sleep over still holding gold.

Lynn, I've been saving energy because I know that's one of your most passionate subjects. Kind of interesting market here. We've got crude oil structurally selling off. It's unclear. It seems like it maybe hit at least a 52-week bottom. I don't know if that's going to be the bottom, but the question there is, can it go lower? Meanwhile, natural gas seems to be in the opposite direction, surprising everybody with its upside strength. What's going on with energy?

A lot of the price action makes sense, even though it can be somewhat disappointing, especially for oil bulls. This is a reason I prefer to play my long-term energy bullishness with the producers and the pipelines, because even in a range-bound market,

Many of them have good balance sheets, are profitable, are spitting off cash flows. And I kind of view them as positive carry options on eventual energy breakout. Whereas I've generally not preferred to hold the underlying. Oil, there's obviously a geopolitical component. There's a slowing economy component. And so as there's maybe less risk of military escalation, it takes some of the oil premium off.

In addition, supply is not super tight at the moment. Natural gas, there was a

a period of time, and it's still the case, where you can get more joules of energy for less price of natural gas than you could with oil. And so there's arbitrage opportunities there. And that's obviously different depending on where you are in the world. Oil is more fungible on average. So transportation costs are less of an issue for it compared to natural gas that generally either needs pipelines or LNG. And so there's been a case where North American natural gas has kind of been artificially cheap for a long time.

Because we haven't always had enough export capacity and things like that to close the arbitrage gaps. And over time, that should, a very long time, that should even out. So in general, I think that there's kind of rational moderation there where oil kind of chills out for a little while and natural gas gets a little bit of a bid.

There's also all sorts of tactical things, weather, things that I don't really close follow as not an energy trader per se. And it's interesting when you look at some of the pipeline stocks, like Enterprise Product Partners was stuck under $30 for a while. That was like its resistance level. And it finally broke out of that.

while going on to continue paying very high distributions. So I think there are still ways to play the energy market. And I think the overall energy market's in a pretty healthy space. And it's certainly still an aspect that I like having in my portfolio.

Lynn, while we're on energy, let's talk a little bit about Energy Secretary Chris Wright taking office. Wow. Talk about a difference between Jennifer Granholm, Grandma Granholm, and Chris Wright. One of the first things that he did was take a tour of the national laboratories that do the most important research on nuclear energy, using that as an opportunity to get on the public stage, grandstand a little bit, and just say, okay, folks,

United States of America is about to mount a nuclear renaissance like nobody's ever seen before. I happen to be a huge fan of that. I couldn't be more excited that we have Chris Wright in charge of energy. What's your take on this? Is this real? Is it really happening? And what is its consequence and meaning longer term?

So I do think it's real. I think basically it's a number of reasons. There's political shifts. There was European energy crises. And then the kind of the observation that AI is going to be more energy intensive than, say, the social media tech wave of the prior decade. And so all of those kind of...

increase the odds that this is real. I think that the CapEx is speaking for itself as well as the narratives. And so I'm long-term bullish on the proliferation of SMRs, long-term bullish on uranium. And I think it's a key energy source that really matters. One of the examples I like to use is in Egypt, where I spend part of each year. They're bringing online a very large nuclear facility

And one of my only criticisms of it is that I wish that they started it earlier because it's something that they sorely need. So when you look at something like Egypt's energy situation, you know, they kind of shifted from structural natural gas exporter to importer. They have a big seasonality component. So, for example, in the summer, everybody's got their air conditioning cranked up and they have these kind of deficits. So they have rolling brownouts, which is

Of course, makes it very hard to do business, to keep yourself cool, all sorts of issues. And there's only so many things that they can really pull the lever on. I mean, trying to build LNG infrastructure would be expensive and they already have structural trade deficits.

And so that'd be expensive. Solar panels and wind. I mean, when I drive down the Red Sea coast from, say, Cairo down to the various resorts there, I mean, I do pass certain wind facilities and solar facilities. And, you know, that's nice around the margins, but that's not baseload power. And so nuclear is one of the low-hanging fruits that they can turn to to solve their kind of recurring problems.

energy brownout situation. And, you know, that's one example, but there's a lot of countries in a similar boat where they only have so many levers they can pull on trying to get more energy, trying to increase their per capita energy consumption to increase quality of life, to make it a desirable place to live and do business. And I think that, you know, as there are increasing frictions around how much more hydrocarbons can we get out of the ground per year,

and how much other kind of issues or frictions you run into. I mean, you might have, you're just in a region where you don't have a lot of coal or natural gas or oil. And nuclear is something where, you know, you can stockpile that for decades. And the nuclear fuel itself is such a small percentage of the overall expense. The biggest expense is kind of the overall capex of

of building these, what has historically been very complex structures and components. And as you've pointed out, I mean, by modularizing the process, by standardizing it, instead of having every nuclear site being its own special snowflake that needs all of its on-site nuances, by being able to standardize and modularize as much as possible,

It can, in theory, bring down the cost pretty significantly, which combined with reasonable fuel cost is one of the few lifelines that a lot of these countries really need. So I'm a long-term bull on nuclear, both hopefully with an American renaissance in nuclear, but then also globally. It's already kind of slowly trending in that direction, and I think it's going to continue.

Lynn, you make an excellent point that as much as nuclear energy is a fantastic source of clean, responsible, long-term solution energy, let's face it, it costs too much and it takes too long to build it. Which one of those do you think is more important? In other words, if you could solve only one of those problems, either get the cost of it down to the point where it's competitive with coal and gas, but it still takes 10 years to build one of these plants, or you could solve it with a more

Or if you could keep it more expensive, but find a way technologically to build a new nuclear plant, a gigawatt-sized nuclear power plant in two or three years instead of seven to ten years. Which do you think is more important in terms of adoption and actually solving the economic problem?

It might be a cop-out to avoid the question because I think that the fact that it takes so long contributes to why it's so expensive. There's like regulation delays and then there's like the actual just engineering complexity of doing it. And I don't think that that's a... I think that's highly correlated. Now,

Speed matters more for developing countries than developed ones. And so, for example, if you're running a fairly mature country where you already have a lot of per capita energy expenditure around the margins, you want more and you also want to replace aging infrastructure, then you have more liberty to say, you know, we can we can spend five or 10 years on a big project as long as the overall economics end up being cheap and clean. Then that's pretty fine for those countries.

If you're a country like India, where you're trying to bring on basically energy as fast as possible from a very low base, speed matters a lot more. And so different variables will matter for different types of markets. But I think those two problems are highly correlated. In Egypt's case, it's partially the fact that it takes so long, but it's also just because when their government has different kind of things that they could spend on,

One of the big things that's been controversial is they're building a new capital, and that's a very expensive thing, and it's not really having rapid economic impacts. And they started that before they started nuclear. In a perfect world, you would have done it in reverse where you start nuclear earlier. So some of it is just policy decisions, but that's on a country-by-country basis. And I think that those two problems are just highly correlated. If you can make it quicker...

you also, in most cases, make it cheaper. I couldn't agree more. And something I find fascinating, I wonder if you have any comments on, is a new business model that a few companies are looking at. I guess Oklo has probably been in the lead on it to say, look, here's the strategy. We've got to accept that nuclear is the right long-term solution. We've also got to accept that it just takes

too long. So let's have a new business model where what we do is we build gas fired power plants that are purpose built and designed for drop in replacement of the gas fired part with a nuclear stuff once the nuclear technology is ready and can be deployed quickly. But we're going to start with gas and transition it to nuclear. What do you think of that business model? It seems to me like that's the way to solve this problem.

I think it's clever because it jumps on two trends. One is that natural gas is still a long-term trend. It's still one of the less expensive, abundant, quick, and fairly clean ways to produce energy. And then a nuclear renaissance is another trend and the SMR breakthroughs and kind of focus there. So I think...

combining those two trends together is powerful. And then mainly just from an engineering standpoint, anytime you can modularize something, anytime you can standardize something, that can make huge gains. Because a lot of the critics of nuclear are

We'll point to these big cost overruns and things like that. Sometimes that's self-imposed. So sometimes the government itself is getting in the way and it kind of, you get in the way, you make it overrun and get super expensive, then you say it doesn't work. And that's why we got in the way. Whereas even without a government being an issue, like in Egypt's case, where they're fully endorsing and kind of strategically involved in the production of nuclear, it still just is a very hard engineering problem to solve. And then there's, of course, safety concerns.

And one of the challenges, of course, is you need cooling. So I see a lot of people say, well, why did Japan build their nuclear facilities on the coast when they know they get tsunamis without realizing that nuclear facilities need a lot of cooling? And there's only so many ways to do that. And so there are all these various constraints. And so any engineering projects that can turn weaknesses into strengths

or they can modularize things or they can combine two trends together, I'm bullish on. So I'm bullish on natural gas long-term and I'm bullish on uranium and I'm bullish on kind of the long-term energy mix that involves nuclear.

Now, as you said a few minutes ago, artificial intelligence is one of the reasons that we need more energy in the first place. Let's talk about the AI trend. I don't know if you use AI yourself day to day. I used to look at it as, okay, well, it's great that my friend Matt Berry is staying on top of this. It's a novelty in my mind. Someday it'll get to the point where it's useful enough that I'm going to use it myself. But when we had ChatGPT3, I

got it for a month. I toyed with it. I said, yeah, this thing's not ready yet. I'm not going to spend my time on this. Lynn, I've gotten to the point where I literally cannot get through a day without using GPT 4.5. I can't imagine what life was like just a month ago before it was released. And I had to go back and forth between the 4.0 model and the 0.1 pro model. And

All of a sudden, people like myself who were maybe a little bit slow adopters have crossed the chasm. We're on top of this. I think it's really going to take off. I'm curious, do you use AI yourself in your day-to-day research work? What is your take on how quickly the adoption of AI is going to increase? And as it does, what's it going to do, not just for energy markets, but for markets generally?

So I do use it regularly. The early use case was basically certain types of search results that AI can just kind of answer questions I have better than Google can in many cases, or Google uses it and integrates it. And so at the top of the search result is AI.

There's also content generation. I was an early user of AI art generation, and I still use that for a variety of hobby projects. And then some of my colleagues at EgoDeath Capital, so that's the Bitcoin venture fund that I'm a general partner at, some of them use AI more extensively than I do, like having multiple AI assistants running projects.

A big topic I focus on is how to make AI more private because obviously there are big data risks with some of these companies or questions around who controls the algorithm. And so some of the, I've looked into say AI startups,

to try to ensure that AI is private or ensure that AI is, that you can kind of have input on the algorithms that you use. And so some of that open source stuff, while not as cutting edge as some of the proprietary stuff, it's generally not that far behind. And so it actually is pretty promising that a lot of the stuff that comes out with these

spearhead big capital companies tends to find itself in quality improvements in the open source space as well. So I think that that trend has long legs to it. I think the comparison size to consider for this industry is that much like how automation has been very impactful for blue collar work,

by automating a lot of the processes and just changing the nature of work in that space and adding a lot of disinflationary aspects to manufacturing, I think that this can have a similar impact for white-collar work. So a lot of tedious labor, a lot of things can be simplified so that every white-collar professional, in addition to somewhat changing the nature of the work they do, they can get a lot more done

because they have energy and computation, which extends their ability and extends the scale that they can do things with. Let's talk about investing around AI. I find this very frustrating for the same reasons I'm frustrated with nuclear energy investing, which is you end up having to invest in uranium, the fuel, because the most exciting companies are not public yet and there really isn't

So much of an investment market for advanced nuclear technology. Seems like the same thing is true in AI, although some of these companies are publicly traded. For the most part, it's NVIDIA, which really just makes the hardware. They're not innovating anything around AI. They're just innovating the chips that the AI runs on.

Is that where the investment market is going to be for AI for the foreseeable future? Or are we going to have a transition at some point where everybody, similar to what happened in the internet hardware space, you know, in the beginning it was Cisco, it was the routers, it was the physical plumbing of the internet. And then we got

more into, okay, it's the Facebook and later Meta and the other tech companies that were developing the software systems. Are we going to have a transition at some point where it's not just about NVIDIA and chips and it starts to be about the companies that are innovating the best AI models? So I think that there will be somewhat of a transition, but I expect it to be more

muted than the example you gave. And I could be wrong on that, but that's kind of my initial read on it because the rise of the really big internet companies we saw throughout the 2010s, they strongly benefit from network effects and their operations are pretty high margin. And so

Social media in particular is really benefiting from network effects. So Google, Alphabet owning YouTube, Facebook, Meta, and Instagram, and the rise of these network effects are...

really powerful. And so they tend to be a winner-take-most market. And that's how you reach multi-trillion dollar sustainable market caps with high profitability. I think that AI is going to have a tougher time with durable network effects. And in addition, it's more hardware intensive, which affects the margins. I think it's certainly not really a healthy space where NVIDIA is printing money hand over fist and all their customers are losing money. That's generally not a

long-term place you want to be in. So I think that there will be somewhat of a shift there. But if I were to estimate, at least from the information I have available to me, I do think that this could be a tech trend that is just more beneficial to consumers than investors.

which is to say that it can make a lot of things way more economical without necessarily making as many trillion dollar companies as the prior kind of social media trend did. Maybe there are facts on the ground that end up changing my perception of that. So I do think that there will be somewhat of a shift. I would not necessarily take the template of the

say the build out of the internet, so hardware and then software, I wouldn't necessarily take that apples to apples in AI.

Lynn, I can't thank you enough for another terrific interview. But before I let you go, tell our listeners a little bit more about what you do at Lynn Alden Investment Strategy, what services are on offer and what they can expect to find at lynnalden.com. Thank you for having me. At lynnalden.com, I provide public research, so a free newsletter as well as public articles. And I have a low cost research service that is read by both sophisticated retail investors as well as institutional investors.

People can also check out Broken Money, my book on the monetary system, as well as I'm a general partner at Ego Death Capital. So any one of those things people could check out. Patrick Ceresna and I will be back as Macro Voices continues right here at macrovoices.com. Macro Voices

Now, back to your hosts, Eric Townsend and Patrick Ceresna. Eric, it was great to have Lynn back on the show. Now let's get to that chart deck. Listeners, you're going to find the download link for the postgame chart deck in your Research Roundup email. If you don't have a Research Roundup email, that means you have not yet registered at Macrovoices.com. Just go to our homepage, Macrovoices.com, and click on the red button over Lynn's picture saying, looking for the downloads. Okay, Eric, what are your thoughts here on equity markets?

Last week, I said to expect a relief rally back up to the 200-day moving average. But then I cautioned that what happens there could be critical to watch, with an eye toward the possibility of another leg down toward lower lows.

Well, so far, that's exactly what's been playing out. We got that relief rally, which stalled initially at the volume-weighted average price line, then it dipped down to retest the short-term moving averages as support, which held, and then it rallied again on Wednesday, but still closed below the 200-day moving average, which is now co-located with the 21-day moving average, right at 5,800 on the June S&P futures contract.

The big question is what happens next. A decisive move and close above the 221-day moving averages could signal the beginning of a V-shaped recovery if this correction is really over. And frankly, I'm kind of skeptical.

So what I'm still watching for closely here is a failure of this rally at or below 5800 and a new leg down. If that happens, a daily close below the lowest of the three short term moving averages, which right now is the eight day moving average at 5654, 5654 on the June futures contract,

That would indicate that we're probably headed toward a retest of the recent lows, if not a leg towards new lower lows. Eric, I...

I agree that the downside is actually still a risk. On page two, I have the chart of the S&P 500. But what I put was the 50-day moving average instead of 200-day. And I think that's a much more relevant level around 5,900 because it's also where the Fibonacci retracement zones are. During bear market rallies, like when something is oversold and snaps back, at least in previous

bear cycles, snapbacks of like 5% to 10% were quite normal. We still can't rule out a little bit more squeezing up several hundred S&P points to the upside. But generally, if the market stays below the 50-day on a sustained basis, then the downside window is open in my mind.

And that leaves the risk for another full leg lower like you were suggesting. Now, there are a couple of things that I'm watching because we had a 10% market correction and in a 10% market correction, they happen frequently, even once a year, you have these pullbacks and then the market is a buy on dip and turns.

But if it's the beginning of something more ominous, like a sustained bear market decline where this turns into a 20 plus percent decline in the markets, there's a couple of things that are commonly evident. So on page three, I have the volatility index, the VIX index.

And what I wanted to, with the boxes on there, highlight that during bearish periods, such as the 2022 bear market, you can observe here that the VIX stayed on a sustained basis for an entire year.

In fact, almost a year and a half above the 20 level on the VIX, maybe a couple of closes below. But generally, the vast majority of the trading was with the VIX above 20. Now, in the early 2023 till present, we have seen a much lower vol regime, a period where the VIX stayed between 12 and 20 on a sustained basis of lower volatility in a bull market.

Now, even though we had numerous little scares, like, for instance, the yen carry trade unwind and things like this that caused temporary spikes, the key was that it very quickly mean reverted back into that lower trade range. So now here we are close to a month of the VIX trading above the 20 level. We're currently trading at 21.

And one of the big puzzles to solve here, which would support the idea that we have more selling to come, is does the VIX stay at this higher elevated level to start to resemble the 2022 period where essentially option premiums command a certain amount of additional volatility premium for that volatile market condition that is often associated with market declines.

Also on page four, I have the chart of the junk bond markets. One of the things that we have seen was a little bit of a breakdown in junk bonds and seen credit spreads for junk bonds start to actually rise from actually decade lows.

And one of the interesting observations to make is that a lot of times 5% to 10% market corrections can occur without rattling the credit markets. But typically when the equity markets are going through something deeper, such as a 15%, 20%, 25% market correction, it is almost always accompanied by stresses in the junk bond markets.

And so one of the things that I'll be looking for as a confirmation as to whether or not this is still got further breaking on the downside is whether or not these junk bond markets fail to rally here and also roll over. And if all of these things are lining up

higher sustained volatilities, credit markets breaking down. It will really start to support the idea that the S&P 500 is vulnerable to the downside. The one thing I'll just leave it with there is that this bounce, it could still last a little bit longer. I would not be shocked if we printed 5,900 on the S&P 500.

But at this stage, my view, very similar to yours, is that after this little bit of a bounce that we're getting here, another full leg lower that could see us under 5,400 and even getting a stone throw away from 5,000 is entirely on the table.

Patrick, let's touch on options-based hedging strategies again this week. What strategies are most useful if you're hopeful that this market is maybe about to recover, but you're still concerned that we might be nearing the top of a dead cat bounce and about to roll over toward new lower lows?

So Eric, when talking about hedging, particularly hedging with options, the considerations are how much volatility premium are you paying and what is the risk associated with that? Because the more you pay for the protection and the hedge, the less asymmetry there is and less payoff for hedging your downside risks.

But the second risk is that if you overpay for the volatility premium, and like we were showing on that VIX chart on page three, if volatility suddenly collapsed back to 12, 13 on the VIX, you're going to take a lot of vega damage on the contraction of you overpaying for the option. But let's just assume one thing. If you are bearish and you believe that we're entering some form of a more prolonged correction cycle,

If it starts to mimic the 2022 period, then this 20 level on the VIX is actually very close to the lower boundary of where volatility would be. And therefore, from that perspective, makes volatility still reasonably priced. So someone who just turns around and buys a put option here as a hedge, so long as that's your thesis, you certainly can take on that risk.

But equally, one of the things that one can consider is using strategies such as collaring. Collaring involves you then turning around and selling a covered call to earn an income premium to help offset the cost of the put hedge. In this kind of market environment, that is pretty interesting because even if you're not entirely outright bearish,

At minimum, one can make an argument that the upside of the market is relatively capped, that the idea that the S&P is imminently going to be ripping toward 6,500 to 7,000 in another leg of a major bull market is maybe not very realistic.

And so therefore selling some premium above on the call options is a way to help reduce the cost of put hedging and allow you to create a lower net gross exposure and less volatility and take away that left tail risk associated with the downside of the markets.

Patrick, last week you told our listeners about a webinar going in-depth on repair strategies, which I think you've already held now. For those listeners that might have missed the live event, is the recording still available?

Eric, last week we talked about the ratio call spread as a repair strategy. And it continues to actually be one of my favorite things. When an investor catches themselves stuck in a stock, needs to lower their cost base for a break-even exit, accept no substitute for this ratio call spread as a way of getting yourself out of that tough situation. One of the things we did

in that webinar that we did earlier this week is talk about the comparison of using this versus traditional dollar cost averaging. And it's very important for listeners to see how they compare and stack up against each other. Those of you that missed that special webinar, the recording is still available. You can find it at bigpictures.com.

trading.com. The link is also in the research roundup email. It takes you to the site and you can watch the free repair strategy webinar available on the site. All right, Eric, let's move on to the dollar index.

We've been in a tight consolidation between 103 and 104 on the Dixie for two full weeks now. I think the more likely resolution to that consolidation is lower below 103, but it's been slow in coming. A daily close above 104 or below 103 should be the tell for the next leg.

Eric, my view even a month ago was that the dollar index was holding at higher highs, was consolidating in a very traditional wedging or flagging formation that was very typical of a continuation pattern to go higher. But over the last month, we saw some serious technical damage that has now brought the dollar back down.

into the trade range that prevailed over the last two years. Now, that doesn't make me outright bearish the dollar, but it does neutralize almost all short-term bullish enthusiasm. Now, we could certainly see a very quick little jump back to 105 to 106 on the dollar index.

but is at this moment neutralizing my stance on the dollar and expecting it to be far more range bound in the same ranges of the previous two years, I think is a very good position to be in on the short term. And then we'll see whether new trends develop from here. Let's move on, Eric, because I wanted to get your thoughts on oil.

We're into the third week of consolidation between 65 and 68 on WTI. I'm still leaning toward a downside resolution, meaning new lower lows. But there's also geopolitical events heating up. So, you know, that's a pretty low conviction view at this point. I guess to expound on that a little bit, I'd say I still think that we're headed toward new lower lows because of President Trump's intention to get us there.

if a geopolitical escalation on the Gaza front doesn't undermine that. And it seems like that's becoming increasingly likely, hence my low conviction. I just want to put oil back into perspective here because we just had a pretty serious drop in crude oil prices from the $80 level back down to this $66 level. Let's call it close to a $15 drop in just a few short months.

Typically, with something that oversold, you would see even a $7 or $8 bounce in crude oil just as a reaction from being incredibly oversold, just a reflexive snap that is very typical in technical price action.

Here, we have seen only a few dollar reaction over the last several weeks as everyone is leaning straight into the selling the moment there's any reaction in oil. We are trading right at the 52-week low, right where we were trading on previous September.

And it's not attracting any buying to react it off of there. This type of price action is very weak and that leaves oil in a very vulnerable state where we could have a temporary breakdown to a lower low, maybe even see $62 or $60 on a temporary basis.

Even though that is the most immediate downside risk, that doesn't make me think that there's a huge downside for oil. It's just simply not bullish right now. It's hard to justify anyone buying it at the very moment.

And some short-term weakness could kind of create that little capitulation moment where a bunch of traders throw in the towel on oil. And that might actually create a trading bottom in the month to come. And so I'm respecting the prevailing downtrend right now, looking at the vulnerability there, but also thinking that that would lead to an opportunity if there was another leg down from here.

All right, Eric, we can't talk charts without touching on gold and this wicked rip to the upside. What are your thoughts here?

Patrick, I've had a structural long position on gold futures for several years now, and I finally started taking profits on that position this week. Now, to be clear, I absolutely am still long-term very much bullish gold. The fundamental argument for dollar devaluation in absolute terms remains very strong.

But the daily and weekly stochastics and RSIs are all flashing extreme overbought, with the daily RSI at 85 and the weekly at 81. So I think this market is overdue for another swing lower.

But more to the point, this has been a terrific ride with gold more than doubling in the last five years since it dipped below $1,500 in March of 2020, just as the pandemic was beginning. So the question I'm asking myself is, do I really think it's realistic to expect gold to double again, like to $6,000 in the next two or three years?

Well, I definitely think $6,000 gold is possible. In fact, I'm pretty confident we're going to see it, but not in the next couple of years, especially with the extreme overbought signals the stochastics are giving us on the weekly chart.

But do I think it's plausible for uranium to double in the next couple of years? Oh, I fully expect it to. And I don't think a triple on uranium in the next two or three years is at all out of the question, whereas I think that's pretty darn ambitious for gold. So it's not a case of not being bullish on gold anymore. It's a case of knowing that the game is to sell high and buy low.

Gold is high right now. Uranium is low. I won't be surprised if uranium gets lower before this is over, so I'm raising cash from my profit-taking on gold and buying only a little bit more uranium mining shares right here while saving most of my dry powder for a washout in the junior miners if we see a bear market develop in equities more broadly.

Well, Eric, for me, gold has measured moves all the way up to $3,200. So I'm not yet too eager to start trimming positioning on the long side of gold. I was looking to see whether or not that consolidation was going to be a little bit longer, you know,

in its duration. It was a very short little multi-week break that gold took. And this breakout is decisively bullish because not only is gold breaking up, but we got silver attempting to break out. All the gold miners are being bulled very well. There is clear money flow going into the space. It's starting to get attention. I don't want to disrupt this current bull impulse. I think there is still room for this to go, even if it might be

the middle innings of this game.

Now, Eric, what are your thoughts here on uranium? Well, we finally had an up week on uranium and the mining shares, but I'm actually a little less optimistic in the short term than I was last week. For a little while, we were starting to see signs of uranium shares outperforming the S&P in the sense that uranium miners were trying to grind out a bottom, maybe drifting to slightly lower lows as the bottom was falling out and the S&P was dropping like a rock.

But the relief rally on the S&P was quite brisk, while uranium miners bounced, but with less enthusiasm. So now those slow stochastics and RSI indicators on the daily uranium mining charts that were at extreme oversold a couple of weeks ago, well, they're climbing steadily back up and starting to enter short-term overbought territory, suggesting a consolidation or another swing lower today.

probably is what comes next. So as I mentioned in my gold commentary, the profits that I've taken on gold are definitely earmarked to buy more uranium shares, adding to my already overweight position. But I'm not rushing to use up all my dry powder just yet. Most of the uranium-related charts are still below their 21-day moving averages. So technically speaking, the trend is still down until proven otherwise.

I'm also watching for a potential scenario to play out, and this one is completely speculative, so it might not happen. I think we're getting closer, Patrick, to Putin and Trump reaching an agreement to end the Ukraine proxy war. I see that as strongly bullish for uranium, but I think there's a good chance the market will get it backwards at first.

A lot of people seem to think that lifting sanctions is going to open up access to Russian uranium because Russian uranium exports have been banned. So they think it's bearish. In reality, Russia isn't a very big producer of uranium, but it's the world's

biggest supplier of conversion and enrichment services. And those conversion and enrichment services becoming openly available to the West again would mean more demand for uranium because now we've got the conversion and enrichment capacity to do something with it.

it. So I think there's a good chance that if and when agreement is reached to end this war, uranium shares will dump on a wrong way signal that will create a fantastic buying opportunity.

The main reason I've started taking profits on my gold position is that I want to redeploy that capital to buy the hell out of that end of war dip on uranium shares if we get one. And since the war ending could very likely be gold bearish, since gold is also a hedge against geopolitical risk, war comes to an end, it would make sense for gold to take a big nosedive.

I'd rather lock in my profits way up here at all-time highs, knowing I'll be able to buy plenty more uranium shares on that end-of-war dip if

if it happens. Now, again, that's all armchair speculation on my part, and I'm lining up quite a few dominoes there. So what I just described might never happen, but if it does, I'll be ready to buy the hell out of it with a whole lot more junior miners being added to my portfolio on the dip using proceeds from gold up here at what for now is all-time highs. And yeah, you know, it might not work out that way. I might miss even higher highs on gold, but

But even if I'm late to the trade and have to buy uranium at a higher price than now because it turns out the bottom was already in, I still think the upside is going to be much bigger on uranium than it's going to be in gold in the next couple of years.

Well, Eric, I had that chart of the Sprott Physical Uranium on page eight. And in my mind, we have actually reached some incredibly oversold levels, selling at a proper discount to net asset value. Overall, the selling pressure has slowly subsided on the short term, and it's trying to uptick here.

Generally, my view on uranium here is that it's now cheap enough to potentially own for long-term investments because I remain bullish uranium and looking for the upside. But what we're going to have to watch is to see is will we start to see flows coming in? Will we see accumulation patterns? Will we see that uranium and uranium miners start to actually take flows again and get bought on dip? The

Right now, it's very early in this cycle. You pretty much have to be buying it as a value investor now just simply by price level alone, which I'm sure a certain number of our listeners would find appealing. But I'm going to be looking technically as to when we see a shift to more bullish price action that the actual upside is getting underway. I wanted to wrap up by looking at page nine, the copper chart.

And just what a rip copper has had for a direct retest of last year's highs around 510.

Now, I think here that while this is a level that copper may pause and create a flagging formation or consolidation, but this is a bull run on the upside. And there's every chance here for copper to make a fresh 52-week high and really give it a go on the upside. What's particularly interesting, though, for me, Eric, is the fact that copper is

uh, miners have not reacted. This has been the commodity alone. The commodity has been running and we haven't seen, uh, the, uh, you know, the Freeport McMorons of the world really joined the party yet. And the question is, can we have scenario where copper, uh,

is in a huge bull run and running and the miners not reacting. It's a very interesting puzzle to solve that, that I'm not totally sure I've got figured out just yet. And finally on page 10 of the, uh, the U S, uh, long bond or a T bond futures. And, uh, clearly we just had the FOMC come out, uh, uh, you know, mixed messages of stagflation, but it's an environment I think that, uh, allows bonds to, uh,

generally gravitate back towards the top end of its ranges. With us holding now above the 50-day moving average on the long bond, I think there's every opportunity for still another leg higher. Now, I'm not outright bullish, like thinking we're going back to 2% yields or something crazy like that. But after that devastating bond bear market that lasted several years,

We've established over the last year and a half this trade range that has been the new base for treasury bonds. And for us to approach, let's say, September's previous high around 127 is not unrealistic. We were just there five months ago. And I think there's room for bonds to gravitate again back to the top end of the ranges. And so it's more of a tactical short-term trade than a bigger macro call.

Folks, if you enjoy Patrick's chart decks, you can get them every single day of the week with a free trial of Big Picture Trading. The details are on the last pages of the slide deck or just go to bigpicturetrading.com. Patrick, tell them what they can expect to find in this week's Research Roundup. Well, in this week's Research Roundup, you're going to find the transcript for today's interview, the chart book we just discussed here in the postgame, and a link to see that repair strategy webinar that we held earlier in the week.

We also included a number of links to articles that we found interesting. You're going to find this link and so much more in this week's Research Roundup. That does it for this week's episode. We appreciate all the feedback and support we get from our listeners, and we're always looking for suggestions on how we can make the program even better. Now, for those of our listeners that write or blog about the markets and would like to share that content with our listeners,

Send us an email at researchroundupatmacrovoices.com and we will consider it for our weekly distributions. If you have not already, follow our main account on X at Macro Voices for all the most recent updates and releases. You can also follow Eric on X at

at Eric S. Townsend. That's Eric spelt with a K. You can also follow me at Patrick Ceresna. On behalf of Eric Townsend and myself, thank you for listening and we'll see you all next week.

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