What Crypto Today May Be Telling Us About 2026�s Tomorrow

DANO WEIR: It's Friday, February 5th, and you are about to go on the markets with Fermata Advisors. My name is Dan O'Weir. I'm the marketing director, joined soon by our marketing principals and marketing principals, our managing principals. Let's give them the right title there. And today, we're looking at what Crypto today may be telling us about 2026 tomorrow or even 2026 right now when it comes to other asset classes.

DANO WEIR: If you know a Crypto maximalist, give them a hug today, check in on them, send them a text. We got to look at... Bitcoin's all-time drawdowns after a rough week for Crypto. Google's looking at record spending this year, what that could mean for AI. Real estate continues to be topsy-turvy. Would you believe resale homes are outpricing new homes? Let's start.

SPEAKER 2: The stock market, the economy, your money. What's the latest and what could be next? Find out now with Fermata On The Markets.

DANO WEIR: Straightforward financial market updates for the brands of Fermata Advisors Sonoma Wealth Advisors Fermata 401k and Fermata tax on the markets starts now managing principles of Fermata Advisors and our private wealth band private wealth brand Sonoma Wealth Darren blonsky cfp Chris sypes cfp guys welcome to the show it's good to see you how's it going Great to be here.

CHRIS SIPES CFP®: Happy Friday.

DANO WEIR: Chris, are you really starting with Elon Musk? That's what we're starting with?

CHRIS SIPES CFP®: I hate to get all philosophical.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: This post was, I picked this thing out yesterday and I was talking to this random dude. I'm like, if the richest dude in the world is posting money can't buy happiness. Dude, that tells you so.

CHRIS SIPES CFP®: See, Darren. That's why we get along so well, because that's exactly what I thought when I saw this. I was like, Because when we, I think it was last week, we showed the richest people of all time, like as a percentage of GDP, essentially, like adjusted for today's dollars. And Elon is not only a rich person, he is the richest person, the richest human to ever live on the planet.

CHRIS SIPES CFP®: For him to say this, you know it's true. There's no way you could say, well, yeah, but if you just overtook that next person, like maybe you would find that happiness you've been looking for. For him to post this, I thought it was really profound from a philosophical level.

CHRIS SIPES CFP®: You know, it is a good reminder that, you know, we talk so much about maximizing wealth and that means all forms of wealth. And and especially the ones that are the most important, the moments that we have with people that we care about and that care about us and the moments you remember for your lifetime, those types of things, trying to maximize those for ourselves is true wealth.

CHRIS SIPES CFP®: And it's not necessarily about money because as the richest human in history will tell you, money will not make you happy.

DANO WEIR: And yet, I just feel like these guys are all so boring. He's the trillionaire who decided to make a car snooze. You could have found Atlantis, bro. Like we could be hunting the Yeti. We could be digging up shipwrecks. I mean, there's some exciting stuff that we could be paying for. He just chooses to do boring things.

CHRIS SIPES CFP®: Oh, he lands rockets backwards. That's pretty cool. All right.

DANO WEIR: All right. All right. That's one. I'll give him that.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: Same human civilization, right? I mean, that's boring.

CHRIS SIPES CFP®: Yeah. It is interesting though. I forget who had the concept of like you know, there's like a window of having enough money to equate to freedom to kind of do what you want. And funny enough, there's actually a ceiling on that because once you get too much money, and, or your money is tied to things that actually don't give you freedom.

CHRIS SIPES CFP®: Like say you're, you know, running a company like you are like Elon, plus he's a public figure. That freedom is actually gone despite the fact that you have so much money. So, anyway. I hate to get all philosophical so early on a Friday morning.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: Well, you and I have talked about this, Chris, and I think it's an important point because there is this like, you know, we talk about wealth, right? We're a wealth manager. That's what we do as a job. And there's almost this like wealth of privacy, which is a total new concept in a lot of ways. And whether or not you can have a life that is private is actually a form of wealth now.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: And I think that, I don't know, but I'm projecting perhaps, but maybe that's what Elon's talking about. Like, I mean, think about the guy's life. He can't do anything without it being completely scrutinized in every form or fashion. Now, let's be fair. He invites a lot of that scrutiny with some of the weird stuff he does and the people he associates with.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: But either way, it's still like there is a wealth of privacy. And that's true. I was talking to a client who's in intelligence. And I asked, is anything really private anymore? And his response was absolutely not. Everything you have on the internet is accessible, whether it's your phone, whether it's your Facebook, whether it's your whatever. We can look at all the information if we have the right clips.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: And I was just like, oh, okay.

CHRIS SIPES CFP®: Write it on a piece of paper, put it in a safe with your jewelry. Yeah. Yeah. Good segue there, Dan. This is from Lizanne Saunders with gold making the runs that it has here lately. We've been talking a lot about gold, and I found this very surprising.

CHRIS SIPES CFP®: This is showing that jewelry makes up almost half of all the above-ground gold reserves, more than twice what banks hold. So interesting. Central Bank is at 18% of gold holdings, while jewelry is at 44%. And, Mars and coins actually much higher than I would have expected to a 23% Central Bank holding. So interesting little tidbit there from, from Lizanne Saunders.

DANO WEIR: Now we're looking at a meme here, Chris, and it says, is it Darren? Is it Hodling or Hodling? How do I say that? Right. Hodling.

DANO WEIR: It has the word on a tombstone. And for those who don't get this joke, what does it mean?

CHRIS SIPES CFP®: Well, as with everything in Bitcoin, it changes so fast that it's almost like not even relevant because I put this in here yesterday. And of course, today, Bitcoin's rallying pretty hard. But Hodling, from my understanding, is like you just hold on to your Bitcoin no matter what. And I think it originated from somebody like misspelling it.

DANO WEIR: Trying to spell hold and then they spelled it was a typo and now it's like a means that you're holding your Bitcoin. You're not selling it.

CHRIS SIPES CFP®: I don't know if that's not right. Please don't come after me. I don't care that much. I'm just that's that's my understanding of it. But Bitcoin's had this big pullback, you know, in the last few weeks. And so yesterday, though, felt who knows if that was the bottom.

CHRIS SIPES CFP®: But sentiment wise, I don't know if you guys agree, but sentiment wise, it felt. Pretty, I don't know how it could get much lower. Right. And so the contrarian, the old contrarian in me just is like, interesting. You know, the, all the stories about the death of Bitcoin and, and, you know, all the reasons not to hold it and yada, yada, yada.

CHRIS SIPES CFP®: It feels very reminiscent of the other times that they've said that as well, but it definitely feels like sentiment is completely washed out. Who knows we could go. We could go lower today. It's rallying a lot, but look, we've said this many, many times.

CHRIS SIPES CFP®: If you're going to be a holder in this asset class, position it in a way that you can, that you can stand it because it's very, very volatile. It's extremely volatile. Always has been always will be. And, you don't get some of the, some of the high returns without high volatility. There's no free lunch in investing.

CHRIS SIPES CFP®: And these are one of those times. And speaking about data, this chart was, I want to say it was from Monday, maybe Friday, when Bitcoin was in a drawdown of 35%. Of course, it got down to, I think, a little over 50% yesterday. But this from bespoke investments just showing that that's actually totally normal.

CHRIS SIPES CFP®: It's done this many many times in the past and actually had bigger drawdowns than this in the past so a lot of the people that have held Bitcoin for a long period of time know that and understand it and it's just you know par for the course so you know but remember these times when you're feeling FOMO on the upside which was not that long ago you know and and you just you want to have it positioned correctly.

CHRIS SIPES CFP®: I couldn't find the source.

CHRIS SIPES CFP®: Article but do you guys remember the guy that was a graduate i want to say of harvard or stanford and this is back when Bitcoin was like a little over a hundred thousand and it was going up and the and the guy was like 25 years old and they interviewed him and he's like Yeah, I took my $100,000, I turned it into $400,000.

CHRIS SIPES CFP®: So then I convinced my parents to give me their retirement money. And he put it like 50% in MicroStrategy and 50% in Bitcoin, like right at the top. And it's like, okay, that's to me an example of like you're going all in on something.

CHRIS SIPES CFP®: No matter how convinced you are that that is the right move, the market. It continues to humble us, you know, no matter what asset class you're in and going all in like that is just insanely risky, especially with money that, you know, isn't yours slash might not be able to, you don't have the time to recoup it.

CHRIS SIPES CFP®: You know, if you're 20 years old and you just put, you know, $10,000 into Bitcoin, cause that's all the money you have. Well, you got the rest of your life to kind of recoup it, learn some lessons there. Taking your parents' retirement money.

CHRIS SIPES CFP®: Wow. I feel bad for that person. Hopefully they didn't stick with that trade.

DANO WEIR: Now, Chris, on this very show, we actually have username BitcoinBlonsky67.

DANO WEIR: And I just would wonder if he has anything to say about this chart. I'm sure you'll talk about it later too, Darren.

CHRIS SIPES CFP®: He had to mute himself. He had to mute himself there. He can't. He can't even.

DANO WEIR: He can't even reply.

CHRIS SIPES CFP®: So this was from Jim Bianco. He had some good charts on this yesterday. The Bitcoin carnage is accelerating down 12%. This was yesterday, of course. Now the fourth worst day this decade. The other three days were around something, quote unquote, breaking. So what is breaking now? In November 9th of 22, it was the FTX failure. June. June 13th of 22 was the Terra Luna collapse. I remember that one pretty clearly.

CHRIS SIPES CFP®: And then March 12th of 2020 was the worst of the COVID shutdown. So yesterday's sell-off was pretty major. But we'll see yet to see anything big blow up. I know there were some rumors around that, but we don't want to pass around any rumors. We'll wait and see what comes out maybe over the weekend. As viewers know, most bad news is released on Friday because we have about a 24-hour memory cycle and it'll be over by Monday.

CHRIS SIPES CFP®: Sentiment indicators this week, the AAII sentiment indicator was at 39, so it continues to drop. Wouldn't be surprised to see this number go down again next week given that they're released on Thursdays. Markets rallying today, though, so who knows. But yesterday was a pretty rough day in the markets kind of across the board.

CHRIS SIPES CFP®: And so we've got an uptick in neutrality and a downturn in the bullishness. The CNN fear and greed index dropped down to 33 fear. It was all the way up at 60 greed one week ago. So it's a pretty big swing. And then Bitcoin was at 12 extreme fear down from 16 extreme fear. So down in the teens. That's typically, you know, washout sentiment.

CHRIS SIPES CFP®: We actually started the week with some pretty positive news, you would think. The ISM Manufacturing Index topped 52.6, and that is the highest since August of 22, and the biggest increase since June of 2020. That's the second biggest jump in the past decade. Now, the... The 50 number is key here because beyond 50 is expansionary and below 50 is considered contractionary.

CHRIS SIPES CFP®: And so we saw a big jump in the manufacturing PMIs on Monday, but the market didn't seem to respond to all that positive, all that positively to that. And this is one of those things where you would think, Hey, isn't, isn't all this spending on manufacturing, isn't that a good thing well From a market's perspective, it has not been.

CHRIS SIPES CFP®: Interesting, we saw huge announcements from Google or Alphabet and Amazon in terms of their CapEx. And I think Microsoft, too, or maybe it was Meta. I can't remember what the third one was. But humongous announcements in terms of the billions that they're going to be putting into data centers and the infrastructure build-outs.

CHRIS SIPES CFP®: And I would encourage anybody that wants to know more about this to look up a researcher. His name is Kai Wu. And Kai has done some work. Around the investment returns when there's a high CapEx spend. And spoiler alert, it's not good. Like Warren Buffett used to say all the time, you want businesses that don't have a huge CapEx spend.

CHRIS SIPES CFP®: It makes them easier to maneuver. Their margins generally are higher, etc. When you get all that money tied into something that is physical, if the environment changes, it's really tough to change that investment. So you're better off to have something that's more ethereal, like an idea or an infrastructure that can be quickly and easily changed rather than something physical.

CHRIS SIPES CFP®: If you think about it, you put all this money into a big plant, an AI plant, let's say, and suddenly there's a new… There's a new thing that comes out that, that makes that plant kind of irrelevant. Well, you can't, you can't redirect those resources very easily. It's in brick and mortar suddenly.

DANO WEIR: Look at meta in the metaverse, Chris. I mean, $73 billion, right? That's, it seemed like, I don't know that anyone ever believed it, but Mark Zuckerberg clearly thought this is the future is that we all will be virtually interacting with one another and we'll have no legs and we'll be floating around and making our own avatars.

DANO WEIR: And that's, you know. If that was the future, man, that's a great investment. And now they shut the whole thing down.

CHRIS SIPES CFP®: Yeah, it's kind of surprising how much money they've lost and yet continue to be such a juggernaut and their margins remain so high. But, you know, the market's kind of treated the companies differently.

CHRIS SIPES CFP®: Google sold off initially, or Alphabet sold off initially on the news, but ended up yesterday really kind of, you know, meh, the market didn't seem to care that much, whereas the market's really punishing Amazon. At least so far today. We'll see if it ends up that way. They just announced this last night. It's recovering a little bit from where it opened.

CHRIS SIPES CFP®: And then you've got Microsoft, who's really been hit hard. I think that's a little bit more tied to, it ties with open AI and the overall sell-off in the software stocks, the small software stocks, I could be wrong, but my sense of it is that a lot of that is tied to Claude, Dan, Darren.

CHRIS SIPES CFP®: You guys might know more, but it seems like Claude, whatever they release with their open source and new apps and stuff, it's like a lot of software is going to be, maybe we don't need it anymore because Claude can just do it. Is that kind of what is being baked in here?

DANO WEIR: That's certainly what they're selling.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: That is what they're selling, but in fairness, I mean, the things that... I personally have been able to do with Claude versus six months ago is insane upgrade. So, I mean, I think, you know, of course, in order to keep the feast alive, they got to keep talking it up, right? But I think that there's some pretty impressive things that these AI models are doing now. And I think I'm going to talk about that in my segment.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: I think the whole market is adjusting to the possibilities of the thing. Actually, we've been saying for a while that last spring when I really started diving into this, I was just like, oh, my goodness, this is going to create so much change so fast. I don't think we're ready for it. And now we're starting to see some of that. And I think market is now starting to digest that possibility.

CHRIS SIPES CFP®: Totally agree. And I think regardless of what is happening. With all the volatility and precious metals, Bitcoin, the momentum stocks, the US stock market in general, all of that volatility is telling you something is changing, right? The market regime of the past 10 years is probably not the market regime of the next 10 years.

CHRIS SIPES CFP®: And we're seeing some of these big shifts like, I think this was Wednesday that this was. Generated, maybe yesterday, value stocks had their best day relative to momentum in over five years. So the last time that the value stocks had this kind of beat was on the vaccine day in November of 2020. And so we're seeing these big spikes.

CHRIS SIPES CFP®: There's been a noticeable shift in the performers of the market where now you've got a lot of the bent. The mag seven are actually negative on a year over year basis while you know all the boring Small companies, medium companies, all the boring stocks that kind of were left for dead have been doing very well, especially the small and medium stocks so far this year have been doing well.

CHRIS SIPES CFP®: So we'll see if that continues. I mean, guys, it's been so long since value has led that. And it's happened so many times with these head fakes where, you know, let's save the party until a few years from now, right? When the trend is solidified, hopefully. But we got these. Now, what are going to be the knock-on effects or what are the possible knock-on effects of this tech sell-off?

CHRIS SIPES CFP®: When you look at the software debt is the biggest decliner in the U.S. Leveraged loan market. We talked a lot about some of the experts in credit like Jeffrey Gundlach from DoubleLine have been warning for several months now that that private credit is a disaster just waiting to happen and that people should be very careful.

CHRIS SIPES CFP®: And we've started to see some of this playing out where a lot of these loans were made to these software companies. Now the software companies, their future is in jeopardy with some of the new technology that's coming out. And that is playing through into some of the private credit.

CHRIS SIPES CFP®: You One thing about private credit is it doesn't get marked to market very often. So you don't really know what the prices are. I think it was last week or the week before we talked about BlackRock coming out and saying that one of their private credit funds was just marked down 19%, I think it was, in one day. You know, they're just like, hey, actually, this is worth 19% less.

CHRIS SIPES CFP®: So you don't have that level of transparency with private credit, but you can see. Some of these, what they call BDCs, business development companies that are publicly traded, what's happening with their stocks.

CHRIS SIPES CFP®: And these are some of those stocks that are publicly traded. And you can see this is over the last year. And the one that's kind of hanging in there, that New Tech One, just in a cursory reading, they do a lot of lending via the SBA.

CHRIS SIPES CFP®: Anybody that's ever tried to borrow money from them, though, it's probably safer. I'm surprised they lend anything at all.

CHRIS SIPES CFP®: Those are jokes. Those are jokes. You know, we always have to be careful with what we talk about here because it has to be sourced. It has to be accurate. So we want to we want to make sure that I guess we got to announce our jokes, which.

CHRIS SIPES CFP®: But anyway, back to the stocks. If you look at how are these stocks performing, well, maybe their loans are not getting marked down, but the public market is definitely saying, hey, there's something going on here.

CHRIS SIPES CFP®: So that is the private market. Shifting for a second to the real estate market. I think you guys remember us going through the month's supply of new homes versus existing homes and how we had talked about the new home supply was up over nine and while the existing homes was like three or less and that that traditionally has been a foreshadowing of what prices do in the future.

CHRIS SIPES CFP®: Well, here we are, this from Hedgeye showing the new construction premium vanishes. So prices for new homes sink below existing homes for the first time. So there used to be a premium on new homes, which makes sense, right? It's all things equal. You'd rather have a new home than a used one.

CHRIS SIPES CFP®: Well. That is no more. And that's because the supply of those new homes has been higher. So supply and demand, possibly the oldest principle in economics there is. There's more supply of new homes on the market, which has dropped the price and therefore there's no premium really.

CHRIS SIPES CFP®: So interesting seeing that playing out in the markets today. This is that home supply chart that we had taken a look at now New home supply has dropped down to 7.9. So it's dropped down a bit, but you see there where it got to maybe like 11 about a year ago. Meanwhile, the existing home's month supply is still under four.

CHRIS SIPES CFP®: And so if we're looking at this a year from now, it wouldn't be surprising to see that new home premium continue to fall. And the prices on the existing homes continue to stay relatively flat given that supply. Now, there's not as much demand today because of interest rates and down payments and all that.

CHRIS SIPES CFP®: So there's the other side of that equation to factor in as well. But when you just look at the month's supply, this is really one of the first times in history of this chart, at least, where we've had such a huge difference in the... In the supply of new homes versus existing.

CHRIS SIPES CFP®: And this is a big reason why. When you look at this from Resi Club by way of Lance Lambert, Lance says, housing's quiet shock absorber. U.S. Homeowners at large have a giant equity buffer this cycle. 76.7% of all U.S. Mortgages have a loan-to-value ratio of 60% or less.

CHRIS SIPES CFP®: At a 60% loan-to-value on a $400,000 home, that would mean about $240,000 owed and $160,000 in equity. So a lot of folks are sitting on equity and don't want to move. They're also sitting on low-interest rate mortgages, don't want to lose that. And so the housing market kind of continues to be kind of locked up from that aspect.

CHRIS SIPES CFP®: All right. So where are we over the last year tracking some of the changes and changes in leadership in the markets here? I think the big story so far over the last really call it since the tariff tantrum is in the US, the small stocks outpacing the large stocks for the first time. Some of the shine coming off of the MAG7.

CHRIS SIPES CFP®: And some of that narrative has started to shift a bit. I still think that the international markets performance has not really been recognized by most yet. I think most people are looking at it as like a blip. Maybe it is, but not getting many questions about it from clients yet.

CHRIS SIPES CFP®: So I think that as usual with these types of cycles, it usually takes a... A few years before the narrative shift catches on and catches up to the price.

CHRIS SIPES CFP®: Like Darren says, the price is what the market says the truth is, right? And then the narrative catches up to it later. And I think that's going to continue to be the case. But when you look over the past year, the small stocks are keeping pace with the S&P, keeping pace with the mighty NASDAQ. And both of those are getting eclipsed pretty heavily by the emerging markets and developed markets.

DANO WEIR: International and bonds and small cap are finally having a moment. And Chris is sitting here like, see, anybody? Is anyone?

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: Guys, guys.

CHRIS SIPES CFP®: Does anybody see this? Yeah. Well, it's at least now what's interesting about it so far is at least in the U.S. A lot of it is earnings, has been earnings driven. This from Mike Sicardi and Augur Infinity showing the market share of the top 10. So think of this as like the mag seven plus a couple.

CHRIS SIPES CFP®: Their market share got up over 40%, which was very high relative to history and concentration. We had talked a lot about that at the time, but the earning share was also fairly high. And, But when you see what the earnings share is forward, there's the trailing in blue. And then you've got the forward earnings.

CHRIS SIPES CFP®: It looks to be, who knows, flattening out. Who knows if that's actually going to start heading the other direction or not. But it is flattening out a little bit. Now, on the international side of things, what's interesting, according to Bob Elliott at Unlimited Funds, is a lot of that... That.

CHRIS SIPES CFP®: Performance has actually come from currencies. So the weakening of the dollar relative to those other currencies and multiple expansion. So it actually hasn't been per se that the earnings have gone up. It's that people have been willing to pay more for those earnings, which we had many, many years of multiple expansion in the US.

CHRIS SIPES CFP®: And then the earnings kind of caught up to it. So that could be the market, you know. Anticipating those earnings turning up. But so far, the earnings haven't really even come through on the international side yet. It's just been multiple expansion and currency. Changes that have driven that.

CHRIS SIPES CFP®: Now this is from Eric Bosmazian at EPB. The labor market remains soft in a low hiring state. The layoff rate inched higher in December. So we're getting some labor numbers and all the advancements in AI can't be helping this. So it's a big challenge. You know, part, I think a lot of the, like the so what for the market is that one, you know, people get a lot of their spending from their jobs, obviously.

CHRIS SIPES CFP®: But I think probably an even bigger factor right now is the asset, you know, the wealth effect, the so-called wealth effect of essentially the, I think it's the top 10% that we've shown in those past. Charts that really account for something like 60% of the spending in the U S.

CHRIS SIPES CFP®: So while jobs are important, for the spending in the economy, I think they're, they're probably a second place to what's going on in the asset markets. And maybe that's why we have not seen, you know, the asset markets sell off with the weakening in jobs. But I think as Darren will probably show through some of the charts, the, the market action has been kind of pricing in a a slower growth.

CHRIS SIPES CFP®: Environment, which would make sense for the shift in interest rates going down, the shift between growth and value within the stock market. Those value stocks tend to pay out sooner than the growth stocks, which tend to be longer horizon payments. And so in a slower growth environment, those are the assets that you would kind of expect.

CHRIS SIPES CFP®: With those jobs numbers, we inched up on the possibility of a rate cut in March, according to the CME FedWatch tool. That inched up to a little over 20% yesterday with some of those labor numbers, because remember, the Fed has the dual mandate of price stability, aka keeping inflation down, fighting off deflation, but also full employment.

CHRIS SIPES CFP®: So the labor market is a big piece of of the feds mandate and so that should give that that possibly could give reasons for a a rate reduction there's a 20 chance for the March March meeting so.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: Some changes there all right that's that's it for the for those slides guys all right we're going to start off on my end you know i'm gonna have you pull up the S&P 500 here.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: All right. So if I had to summarize this week in its essence, this is the S&P 500. This is the largest 500 US-based stocks. Often uses the, when people say the market, they're talking about the S&P or the Dow. Market's vastly bigger than that, but that's kind of what people think about when they think about the market.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: They often compare their portfolios to the S&P 500. If I had to categorize what happened this week, it would be a growth scare. So we're seeing a nice bounce here on a Friday. I'm really watching this closely to see if it bounces above this 20-period moving average right here.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: As Chris said earlier, the market does what the market does, and we fit the narrative. It makes sense of it. But we're coming right up under that really important trading daily average. If we close below that, that's often a sign that things are weak. We saw that.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: Close below that early or i guess on the 24th of January it looked like we're going to go back above it and then we came back down in so i'm seeing weakness in the market overall i think right now we've got a little bit of that growth scare that i was talking about we hit that all time high pretty much worked our way down from there year to date we're actually as of the close yesterday we were in the negative for the year although we'll see how we close out here at one o'clock.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: After 9.30 on a Friday, I'm not reading the signals until I see the close at 1 o'clock. People will position.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: So a couple of things that we saw this week that were really big. Gold actually had its biggest single day drop since 1983. And you can see that drop here. So we haven't dropped gold that hard since 1983. Pretty crazy. And silver... Had its largest daily decline, intraday decline on record. Never has dropped. So folks, you saw history this week.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: In the precious metal markets, namely in silver, and it's been a long time since we saw it close like we saw in gold. Chris and I always say, if you stretch a rubber band one way and you stretch it back there, it's going to snap back. And when silver went up so quick and then back down, looks like it's holding support right here at $64 an ounce, and we're going to close up a little bit higher this week.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: Generally, I would look at that chart and think we're headed back down. I think it would be surprising if this one... Started trading back up in a really aggressive way. I'm bearish on silver, bearish on gold at this point. I think they've moved too hard too fast, and I think it's going to get harder to move that up.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: And I think there's a lot of people that started unloading up there. There is lots of rumors going on out there that the banks were blowing up because of their positions on gold and silver and that there was some financial engineering happening this week to help mitigate some of that. Who knows?

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: What is oil saying about what's headed our way in the Middle East so we talked about this last week this building the price of oil suggesting that there's something heating up out there that continues to look like we're going to go higher in oil watch the headlines over the next day next 48 hours as it relates to Iran and looking closer and closer like we're headed to some kind of military exchange there.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: And oil certainly seems to be whispering that if, if things were going to calm down in the Middle East, I'd be seeing the chart a little bit different and I'm not seeing what I would want to see to say, oh yeah, things look like they're going to get better in the Middle East. I don't see that right now on the chart. And you can see that here because there's like this double top.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: Let me get, so I don't want that one. So we, we would be.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: Basically running like a double top here if we were going to see so it would have like this motion here and i'm trying to get another indicator here use let's do this okay so a double top would be something like this we would go down here we would go up here we go down here and then we would break below this area here and that would be a double top that would be telling you that things probably going to come down Middle East charts are saying that is not the case right now so let me show you some else it's interesting and this is a triple top in Nvidia which we're watching closely because there's such a big concentration of the overall market and it looked like that triple top was going to break down and then we got this huge green candle i really want to see this close today it was looking lights out for Nvidia last night that might be shifting a little bit And we'll see shortly.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: So there's this kind of growth scare in the economy going on right now. If it was the inflation fear trade that we'd been seeing, we would be seeing stocks down and yields rising. But yields started falling this week, which tells you that stocks down and yields rising and yields falling. That's the growth scare.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: That's, oh, wait, maybe things are actually going to slow down more. Certainly, the political parties that are not in power would. Love to walk into the midterms with an economy that is not doing well. That would help them, but not too awful because those who are of the party that are not in power, they don't want to get kicked out too. So it's kind of just one.

CHRIS SIPES CFP®: One thing to add on that too, Darren, is what's interesting about markets. It's, it, it wouldn't even have to be an actual slowdown in growth.

CHRIS SIPES CFP®: It just needs to be less growth than was already priced in. So the market always works off of relative changes. So rewind back to when everyone was expecting so much growth. That was priced into the markets. And if we don't get that growth and we just get less of it, we still have growth, but we don't get as much as expected. The market is a relative game.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: Well, so that's part of the issue that you're seeing in.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: These AI stocks are priced to perfection. They're just priced to be perfect. If we don't get perfection from them, like we're starting to not see from Amazon and others, the market's going to beat them up. They had great quarters, but it wasn't a perfect quarter.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: That's proving to be pretty painful. Amazon's earnings...

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: They weren't awful, but they weren't perfect. And now the market says, oh, you're not perfect. One of the areas where we're seeing a pretty significant deleveraging, right? So over this last week, we heard about gold. We heard about silver. We had Bitcoin. We had de-dollarization.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: And now the market's saying, hey, hold my beer. Like, maybe we're not de-dollarizing. Maybe not everybody's going to gold and silver. And Bitcoin, the famous, you know, preserver of wealth, is actually starting to look a little bit more like a leveraged tech. Trade and just getting absolutely destroyed this week.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: I think yesterday was the first day ever that we had a $10,000 down day in Bitcoin. So for those trying to argue that Bitcoin is less volatile and a maturing asset, they're full of it. Not happening yet, at least. But we've seen a nice bounce, 12% update so far. I actually kind of like this area for a short-term bottom for Bitcoin.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: A lot of people calling for the end of the world when it comes to Bitcoin, but there is a lot of support right around in this area. So I think it's going to have to work through that area to go a lot lower. And you can see this big green candle, which is often a sign of at least a short term bottoming.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: And I would expect this to trade up into, oh, the 77 range. There's definitely a lot of resistance down up in the 80 range as well. So we'll be watching that closely. But yeah, rough week. So if I'm going to wrap up the week in just kind of a bullish and bearish setup, I'm going to say GDP is still tracking at 4%.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: Ism manufacturing looks like we're expanding in manufacturing. Services is looking steady. The corporate earnings are mostly beating, right? We're seeing corporate earnings come in pretty strong and the Fed still has not cut rates. They've got room to cut rates if things start getting ugly. If I'm going to go on the T-chart and saying what's bearish for the week.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: I'm going to say, hey, layoffs are the worst since January of 2009. So that's a long time. We haven't had layoffs like this since the 2008 crisis. We're seeing a lot of that. We're seeing job openings at the lowest since 2020. The ADP report for jobs, only 22,000 private jobs were added. There's massive AI spending with an unclear AI, right?

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: So all these data centers being built. And you saw this happen a couple of weeks ago where chat GBT said, hey, we're going to start advertising on these AI bots. And so nobody's really figured out what the economics of this crazy investment are. And then we've got Warsh now as a hawkish Fed president.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: So we don't really know how that plays out. And things have to kind of shift because of that. Underneath the hood, if we're really dissecting that, you've got this labor market that's weakening.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: It appears to me that, and I think a lot of people are unwilling to admit this, but at least AI is starting to take entry-level jobs at this point. And that's something that'll need to be watched. Well, I'm going to leave it there for the week. Hope everyone has a great weekend, and we'll be back next week to brief it up.

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