Crypto's Down, Gold's Down...What's Up?

DANO WEIR: Happy Friday. Welcome to On The Markets. What's On The Markets? It is Sonoma Wealth Advisors and the Fermata Advisors family of brands look at the Markets and the economy and what's going on in money and in your life and in your pocketbook and your investments this week. Crypto down, gold down. What's up? Is anything up?

DANO WEIR: We're going to take a look with our managing principals, Daren Blonski and Chris Sipes. Gold taking a significant tumble this week, today especially, despite a series of charts that show its significant performance recently. So does that mean that it's topped? Silver is getting smoked. I don't know if there's anything else to say about it.

DANO WEIR: That's just a fact. So there's one thing to talk about. The president made clear his nomination for the next Fed chair. What that could mean possibly about future interest rates, if confirmed. Is Elon a modern-Day Robber Baron? His net worth sure lines up right. The S&P is holding its own after briefly touching $7,000.

SPEAKER 2: And let's get into it. Sonoma Wealth Advisors, Fermata 401k and Fermata Tax. On The Markets starts now.

DANO WEIR: So we do have the various arms of the company, 401k, tax, and private wealth brand is Sonoma Wealth Advisors. They are the managing principals, Daren Blonski, Chris Sipes. Guys, it's a lazy Friday in January. There are absolutely zero headlines today. I don't even know if we have a show that we can do, really.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: I'm not even sure we can talk about half the headlines out there.

DANO WEIR: Yeah, we're going to have to skip most of them.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: Without sounding nuts, right? It's just unbelievable what's going on right now. But hey, as the world turns, or as our friend Jackie says, as the ranch turns.

DANO WEIR: Yeah, and Daren told me a long time ago, change the only consistent variable. So we are always ready for it around here.

CHRIS SIPES CFP®: What do you call it, Daren? The orbiting ball of chaos? Indeed.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: Yeah.

CHRIS SIPES CFP®: Indeed. We're on the orbiting ball of chaos. Here we are. Yeah, this is pretty neat showing the, and this is adjusted for today's dollars, right? So the richest Americans of all time in today's dollars. Elon, I was surprised he was so far ahead of Rockefeller. Because, you know, everything you read about Rockefeller and... Carnegie too. In their Day, they were just...

CHRIS SIPES CFP®: Well, the fact that they're still here all this time later, I guess is a testament to just how vast their wealth was. And then Cornelius Vanderbilt, same thing. But then look at the rest of these names on this list, guys. Most of these people are people from our time and people we would be familiar with. And so, 25%.

DANO WEIR: Of this list is Walmart.

CHRIS SIPES CFP®: Yeah, right, exactly. And we talk about, and that was the point of this post, by the way, or one of the points of this post by, oh, now I'm going to blank on it, of course.

DANO WEIR: Visual Capitalist.

CHRIS SIPES CFP®: Well, yes, but the CPA that posted it, Jeff, anyway, he's done a lot with Kitsis, and he's involved with HolistaPlan. But anyway, he talks about the heirs of Walmart and just how well they did with their estate planning for Sam Walton and the fact that his wealth survived to his heirs to the point where there's still several of his heirs on the richest Americans of all time list.

CHRIS SIPES CFP®: And he mentions in there that a lot of what they did is case law for... Certain types of trusts, GRATs and CLATs and all that was based on estate planning done by the Waltons.

CHRIS SIPES CFP®: But I think bigger picture, it does just show you, illustrates, we've been talking about the bifurcation in the economy today, the instability politically that's being generated by the wealth gap. And just how much spending and how much our economy is reliant on that top part of the K-shaped economy today. And this is pretty illustrative of that, I think.

DANO WEIR: And for those who, for our audio audience, we are looking at a meme and it's got the richest Americans of all time. And it does have Andrew Carnegie at $460 billion adjusted for inflation. Rockefeller, $498 billion adjusted for inflation.

DANO WEIR: Larry Ellison and Sergey from Google. No, sorry. Larry Ellison from Oracle. Sergey Brin from Google in the $200 billion range. And then Elon's at the very top with $745 billion, which is pretty interesting. And half of this list is still alive.

CHRIS SIPES CFP®: Yeah, absolutely. So the quote, the investing quote of the Day today by way of Meb is diversification is protection against ignorance. And that's from Peter Thiel. Diversification is protection against ignorance. And I take this to mean less so like ignorance in the way that you might traditionally think about it in that you are, you know, not an educated person, but rather from an investment perspective.

CHRIS SIPES CFP®: It's just... Ignorance in a way of, of like, you can't know, right? Things that you don't know, you don't know, you don't know, you can't know that you don't know it. Right. And, today happens to be a perfect illustration of this with gold, down 10%, silver down 28, I think, or more, at the close.

CHRIS SIPES CFP®: So there's just things that will happen in the investing world that you can't know. And that kind of ignorance is the way I look at this quote. Where diversification is the only logical approach to combating that kind of ignorance that we all have, no matter how sophisticated you are of an investor.

DANO WEIR: It's my favorite quote from the Bush administration, and it's the only one, which is Donald Rumsfeld talking about the unknown unknowns. You've got the known knowns, you've got the known unknowns, and then the unknown unknowns is where you're just like, you know, black swan event.

CHRIS SIPES CFP®: Yeah. Now, this was... Some decently big news in the financial world last Friday. We always talk about how bad news gets dumped after the market closes on Fridays. So it's always a mixed bag on Fridays. You're looking forward to the weekends, but what's coming down the pike? Last week, BlackRock cuts the value of private debt fund by 19% waves fee.

CHRIS SIPES CFP®: Now, private debt means that it's not publicly listed. It's not publicly traded. So there's private equity, there's private debt. Many commentators like Jeff Gundlach, for example, have been saying that there's a lot of trouble in the private equity and private debt space specifically. And it's been avoided for a long period of time because it's not required to be marked to market.

CHRIS SIPES CFP®: There's no quotes on the prices. It has to be appraised. The value... Gets, you know, it doesn't get updated every single Day like it does in the public Markets. Now, if you remember, maybe last year, two years ago, I can't remember, they started talking about adding private equity and private debt to 401ks, which was, for me personally, pretty big red flag.

CHRIS SIPES CFP®: It's like, oh, wow, of course, they're going to take this, you know, asset class that is totally struggling allow people put in people's 401ks right and then people are going to look at the at the performance in the past which is what we what most people do which doesn't indicate future performance if anything you know it can it can be a potential trap there but people are going to look at this past performance on on these private investments and be like, wow, this is great.

CHRIS SIPES CFP®: Let me put my money in it, right?

CHRIS SIPES CFP®: And- just not not great illiquid you know so so tighter Markets but i think this is something going on under the surface that isn't really being talked about right now because there's 50 other you know headlines above it right that are probably more shocking and that people understand more but in the financial world this one's got me a little a little puzzled and a little you know perked perks for someone.

DANO WEIR: Who doesn't understand, can you illustrate just really basically what private debt is? Like I borrowed 2 million from BlackRock so I can start my DJ business. Like what is private debt?

CHRIS SIPES CFP®: Well, let's hope it's not quite that egregious, but.

DANO WEIR: I guess- We're expanding rapidly. We're going to take over every wedding on the Western seaboard.

CHRIS SIPES CFP®: Yeah. So- Let's give it a simple example that I think most people would understand. It would be real estate.

CHRIS SIPES CFP®: You've got a shopping mall or an office building that you are trying to finance. The banks won't finance it because these days most banks don't actually lend money anymore. So you have to go to the private investors.

CHRIS SIPES CFP®: They're going to come in they're going to loan you the money expect an interest rate in return but when it's through a private investor, then it doesn't have to be, Mark to market, meaning that, you know, they carry it on their books.

CHRIS SIPES CFP®: You know, whatever the price is that it was originally evaluated at, you know, until something bad happens, people stop paying the loan back. And then it's like, Oh, actually we're not collecting on this loan anymore. And hate sorry, all of our investors, we're not going to be able to pay you back what we thought we were going to because our loan is defaulting.

CHRIS SIPES CFP®: So that's why it got marked down so much in one Day in this case is that probably some of the loans were underperforming. But the private debt can go to different types of businesses, different types of asset classes. It doesn't have to be real estate.

CHRIS SIPES CFP®: That's just an example that I think most people would. You know, identify with. But, because it's not publicly traded, it doesn't have as transparent a pricing I think is the thing to take away from this. And so, things can move quickly in this kind of shadow, shadow banking arena.

CHRIS SIPES CFP®: So big news today, president Trump announced he will nominate Kevin Warsh for the Fed chair. This from Goldman Sachs. They say Warsh was previously a Fed governor from 2006 till 2011, which was the great financial crisis. In recent comments, he has advocated lowering interest rates and shrinking the Fed's balance sheet.

CHRIS SIPES CFP®: Senator Tillis, a member of the Senate Banking Committee, reiterated this morning that he will oppose the confirmation of any Fed nominee, including a potential chair, until the Department Of Justice's investigation into Chair Powell is resolved. So remember the Department Of Justice has sent out that indictment over the renovation of the Fed building.

CHRIS SIPES CFP®: So Tillis is saying he's basically going to block the nomination until that is removed. And Goldman goes on to say opposition from one Republican member of the committee is enough to stall the nomination if no committee Democrats support it. So likely we're going to see that.

CHRIS SIPES CFP®: Thing that's indictment against pal retracted i'm guessing in order for Warsh to get get through and you know the the market's reaction i who knows if this has to do with the gold and silver sell-off today we saw it intraday yesterday there was like a 10 swing in gold intraday which people were saying wow that's crazy i can't believe that happened likely that was news getting out that Trump was going to appoint Warsh.

CHRIS SIPES CFP®: The insiders start doing their thing, which is not ethical or legal in most cases, but that's what happened. And the betting Markets, Kalshi, for example, had Warsh at like 94% by this morning before the announcement was made. So, you know, it was known, right? And And then today, Markets open up, silver and gold sell off.

CHRIS SIPES CFP®: It seems a little exaggerated based on, yeah, if Warsh is going to shrink the Fed's balance sheet, which let me just say, I'll believe that when I see it. But the market seems to believe it, or at least it believed it enough to get the selling initiated in silver and in gold, which then kicked into the futures Markets. And started triggering the cascade of events that happened today in the precious metals.

CHRIS SIPES CFP®: Okay, so we got the sentiment indicators this week from AAII. We're pretty bullish still in the mid 40s up until today. And then because these are released on Thursdays, remember, so it does not include Friday's market action.

CHRIS SIPES CFP®: So still on the... Bullish side then we've got the cnn fear and greed index at 56 which is greed unchanged from 53 neutral one week ago not not too much change there bitcoin down at 16 extreme fear which is down even from last week at 24.

CHRIS SIPES CFP®: Now remember we've only seen it get in the teens a few times who knows if this is the case this time but previously when the sentiment was that awful in bitcoin that that was a contrarian indicator and things turned around in bitcoin shortly after that so we'll see if that holds true this time especially with the sell-off in the metals you know maybe some of that money finds its way into bitcoin who knows Darren says tis but a scratch that's right that's right gold and silver investors today feeling feeling like bitcoin investors for sure and they have felt like bitcoin investors leading into this right because it felt like up until today and yesterday you.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: Know the precious metals were just going up every single Day and boy bitcoins felt like that before too so i think they can they can the charts and gold and silver today are just like unbelievable. Like we always say, if it goes fast in one direction, it's going to go fast in the other direction.

CHRIS SIPES CFP®: That's right.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: Definitely seeing that come home to roost today.

CHRIS SIPES CFP®: That's right. So this from Bob Elliott, you know, Bob's been on the show before and, you know, it always makes you feel a little bit vindicated when someone smarter than you says something that you're like, oh, yeah, that's kind of what I was thinking. Right.

CHRIS SIPES CFP®: And here he's showing the personal savings rate and that dipped back down. We're kind of on the lower end of this long term chart, which goes back to 1995. And so Bob says the economy is the stock market. Strong second half 2025 household consumption numbers. So households were still consuming and spending a lot.

CHRIS SIPES CFP®: Required one of the sharpest drops in the savings rate. In decades, leaving little else supporting the economy other than spending down asset gains. So what's that mean? Well, people are using the gains, you know, using the gains in the Markets to fuel their consumption. And we've shown that over the last few weeks on, you know, how the, you know, the top, top part of the K shape, they have all the assets.

CHRIS SIPES CFP®: They do most of the spending. Therefore, most of the economy is tied to what they are doing and what they are doing is tied to what the market's doing. So it's a very, you know, kind of fragile system. We need in the U S at least we need the, the market to continue to show strength in order to continue to flow through, in the, in these consumption numbers.

CHRIS SIPES CFP®: All right. So We've got the short-term interest rates, the two-year treasury rate here in dark blue versus the target Fed funds rate, since all the rage is talking about the Fed lowering interest rates. For what it's worth, interest rates didn't change that much today. They were actually up on the news of Warsh being nominated.

CHRIS SIPES CFP®: So who knows if that's a case of the market already had it priced in, that's, that's possible. Not too much in the way of changes as far as expected cuts this year. Remember, the chair doesn't make the decision by themselves. It's a committee. And so the chair has to get consensus in order to raise or lower those rates.

CHRIS SIPES CFP®: But we've long said that, and this is based on other commentators saying this before us, that the two-year treasury is a good indicator of what the price of the short-term interest rates should be. And not much of a spread as of yesterday, where just 24 bps spread in, or less than that, 21 bps.

CHRIS SIPES CFP®: Sorry, 19. Doing all the math there on the reply. 19 bps. It's going down every minute. Basis points. Less than 20 basis points. So not a huge spread where the Fed funds could be considered to be a little bit tight versus the two-year. So Maybe a little tight, but it doesn't seem like the market is screaming for interest rate drops, per se. So we'll see.

CHRIS SIPES CFP®: The market did not seem to like the idea of the Fed shrinking its balance sheet. The Fed has been expanding its balance sheet for so long, it's hard to even imagine them shrinking it. They did I guess the last time they did was in 2022, and we all know what happened then. So we'll see if that's going to be the case with the new Fed chair.

CHRIS SIPES CFP®: All right, this from Bank Of America showing that during previous bear Markets, that the emerging Markets have tended to do well. Bear Markets in the U. S. And bear Markets in the dollar have tended to be a tailwind for emerging Markets. So if we are changing the paradigm and if we're going through the new cycle, if the new cycle is starting, which you can...

CHRIS SIPES CFP®: See here based on this chart that it does tend to have a wave cycle to it. If that's the case, depending on the length of this cycle, then you might start to see some diversification in the emerging and developed Markets showing more strength, continuing to show more strength.

CHRIS SIPES CFP®: This chart's even better from Ben Carlson at Ritholds, just showing Usually when these cycles happen, they tend to last for a fairly long period of time. And then depending on the cycle, the spreads between the U. S. And the foreign Markets can be fairly large. So the dark blue here is showing the U. S. Outperformance. The red is showing international outperformance.

CHRIS SIPES CFP®: You can see that we've been in a very long period of outperforming us outperforming, you know, up until 2025. And that of course ended in 25. So strong start to the year so far in emerging and developed Markets. We'll see if that continues throughout the year. We can kind of see those cycles illustrated even, even better here by decade. And this is again, from Ben Carlson showing.

CHRIS SIPES CFP®: That the emerging Markets tend, they don't tend to do well at the same time as the US. That doesn't happen very often. They usually kind of offset each other. So you're getting diversification benefits from owning these two assets. They don't tend to move as in sync as you might think, just given that they're both in the equity market.

CHRIS SIPES CFP®: We got the... Trade deficit, this is from Lizanne Saunders at Schwab. November trade deficit widened to 56.8 billion versus the estimate at 44 billion. So the actual was way off of the estimates. It was off by 29.2 billion from the prior month. So imports were up. Imports were up 5% and exports were down 3.6.

CHRIS SIPES CFP®: So a lot of noise in this chart over the last year, year and a half since the tariffs have been put on. But the trade deficit seems to be somewhat widening and not narrowing at this point yet. So we'll see if that continues. But that is having an effect on the value of the dollar. That's the so what, right? Which is leading to the strength that we're seeing in commodities.

CHRIS SIPES CFP®: Now, this is prior to the huge sell-off in precious metals, so this chart's already dated. But this is from Ole Hansen, and he says, one for the record books. The Bloomberg Commodity Total Return Index is heading for its strongest monthly gain in decades, up 15%. Percent and eclipsing several double-digit months seen between 2002 and 2010 when China entered the global stage and accumulated raw materials at a breakneck pace.

CHRIS SIPES CFP®: While precious metals are doing much of the heavy lifting, the breadth of the rally across the commodity complex is notable. So really, other than cocoa, sugar, and corn, the rest of the commodity complex seems to be doing pretty well, led by precious metals. In the energy sector.

CHRIS SIPES CFP®: Now, they make up precious metals and energy and industrial metals make up a bigger part of the commodity index, which is why that commodity index shows the strength that it does, even though some of the things like live cattle might not be showing as much of a jump. So they're more heavily weighted towards energy, precious metals, and industrials in the commodity Deodex.

CHRIS SIPES CFP®: Now, this is notable because most investors don't have much, if any, exposure to commodities.

CHRIS SIPES CFP®: And so again, if the paradigm is shifting, if the times they are changing, and we are heading into a different time period where the commodities might be showing more strength, and typically those cycles last for a while, if your portfolio does not have any exposure to these areas, it might be worth considering looking at them because the environment could be changing.

DANO WEIR: And Chris, an interesting note on that chart, by the way, and I wish I had it sourced handy, but I saw this. I'll have to dig it up. You saw a cocoa was a standout on there, chocolate, you know, negative 30%. I've actually seen that there are some chocolate manufacturers who, in the United States, in order to call it chocolate, you have to have a certain percentage of cocoa in it.

DANO WEIR: And it's gotten so expensive that they've had to rename their product to like... Chocolate flavored or like chocolate inspired or something like that just because chocolate itself has gotten so pricey interesting be on the lookout for chocolate ish right sort of kind of chocolate so.

CHRIS SIPES CFP®: Another so this this is strange this is also from Ben Carlson showing the S&P 500 versus gold annual returns by decade So how strange is it that gold is doing well along with US stocks? Well, it's pretty weird.

CHRIS SIPES CFP®: At least going back to the 70s, you can see that typically they are not both positive like they have been so far in the 2020s. So this move that we've been seeing in precious metals is not normal, especially alongside a bull market in equities.

CHRIS SIPES CFP®: Who knows all the reasons why. There are several reasons. Like anything in life, it doesn't, not just one thing is happening. And it's only going to be clear in hindsight. However, at least so far in the 2020s, both of these asset classes have shown very strong returns, which is abnormal relative to history.

CHRIS SIPES CFP®: And you can see that gold. This is gold against some other currencies as a share of foreign exchange reserves. And it's almost one to one, it looks like, by this chart where the U. S. Dollar is losing its prominence in terms of the foreign exchange reserves while gold is gaining.

CHRIS SIPES CFP®: It looks like those two lines are going to get closer to one another if this trend continues. Now, that's not all that strange. Looks to the early 90s. Central banks, foreign exchange reserves were more so in gold than treasuries.

CHRIS SIPES CFP®: And so that time period, really, if you're only familiar with investing since the early 90s, where we've been in this paradigm of the dollar dominance, treasury dominance, interest rates going down constantly, that is like anything.

CHRIS SIPES CFP®: And it's a potentially temporary situation. It won't last forever, even though it feels like it's been a very long time. These things can and do change with time and with what's happening in the world.

CHRIS SIPES CFP®: This one, interesting. Now, this was right before today's big drop in gold. So this via Bloomberg Opinion, measured in gold, U. S. Stocks hit a 12-year low. So notice the other drop was COVID-19. Liberation Day got a little bit down there.

CHRIS SIPES CFP®: But really, since 2014 or so, you know, stocks were kind of outperforming the gold market, but no longer. And so gold had gotten pretty stretched coming into today. You know, so it's regardless of the news of Warsh.

CHRIS SIPES CFP®: Et cetera. It could have just been a pullback in, in gold just due to the fact that, it had run so far and so fast, you know, who knows if it was doing that based on the expectation that, Rick reader from, black rock was going to be the next, chair that was, you know, I think Tuesday he was in the front runner. So, so that changed, but, it got fairly stretch which is illustrated here by Isabel Nett.

CHRIS SIPES CFP®: They're showing gold as rich as it gets versus other assets. So the median percentile, gold versus commodities, Eurostox, the FTSE 100, raw materials, copper, oil. Em, Nikkei, US Treasuries, et cetera. So it got pretty expensive relative to where it's been priced relative to these other assets. Historically, that could continue.

CHRIS SIPES CFP®: I mean, we've been talking about the S&P being expensive relative to its historical price for years. So that could continue with gold. It's not necessarily, doesn't mean it's going to turn around right away, but it's it's possible that that that's going to last for a while. This one, interesting, you know, we have the conversation a lot with people around, you know, your home as an investment, right?

CHRIS SIPES CFP®: Which we, you know, we want to caution people, like, don't think of your home as an investment. Sure, it might hold its value, but there's a huge consumption portion to the home. And a lot of times people are weighing, you know, Do I put money into real estate? Do I put money into the Markets, et cetera, et cetera? This is showing the Case-Shiller Home Price Index versus other asset classes over a 20-year annualized return.

CHRIS SIPES CFP®: And they've got the different cities down there and those annualized returns versus the S&P and versus gold. And it's pretty stark. The best performer over the last 20 years is actually Dallas. I wouldn't have guessed that. I would have guessed somewhere in the Bay Area. But it's been Dallas, according to the Case-Shiller.

DANO WEIR: That's hard to believe.

CHRIS SIPES CFP®: Yeah, yeah. In Seattle, well, I guess Charlotte, Seattle, and Dallas all had the same annualized returns over that 20 years. I would not have guessed that there wasn't a Bay Area city on the top of that list.

DANO WEIR: San Francisco's in there at 2.5.

CHRIS SIPES CFP®: Yeah, but I mean towards the top, I should say. Sorry.

DANO WEIR: Yeah.

CHRIS SIPES CFP®: So anyway, you know.

DANO WEIR: It was already expensive, that's why.

CHRIS SIPES CFP®: Yeah, yeah, probably, probably. So, you know, I guess if there's another conversation we have regularly, I'm renting. I feel like I'm throwing my money away and, you know, I feel like I'm being left behind financially. Eh.

CHRIS SIPES CFP®: Do your investing on the side while you're saving for a house or while a house is on the horizon. Financially, at least, you might come out as good or better if this continues in the future.

CHRIS SIPES CFP®: We'll see what the future holds, but I thought that chart was pretty interesting from Bespoke.

CHRIS SIPES CFP®: That's all I've got. So you've got some crazy charts to show us, Darren, in the precious metal space.

DANO WEIR: I got one thing. I was able to source it since I brought it up. I just want to make sure we have to have sourced information, Chris. All right. So here we go. This is the breaking news you really wanted to see today.

DANO WEIR: This is from the Today Show with reporting by The New York Times. A New York Times reported rising prices in West Africa's cocoa production has decreased in recent years due to prolonged droughts, higher temperatures and unpredictable rainfall.

DANO WEIR: One of the experts says some brands are turning to less expensive vegetable oils and swapping out cocoa for more sugar. Doing so can change the taste and labeling since brands can't call a product chocolate under FDA rules. So if you've seen chocolate flavor, chocolate taste or chocolatey, that's because it's not actually chocolate.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: You know, they do the same thing with peanut butter. Have you seen that? Like Skippy's like peanut spread now or something like that. Like they fill it full of other junk and call it peanut spread. It's a peanut butter.

DANO WEIR: All right. We're off food onto something much more digestible oil.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: Oil. So, man, there's a lot of headlines today and we're just digesting the news on Friday. And a lot of stuff, I think it'll move Markets as it gets adjusted. I think it's always curious that it all comes out after the close.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: I don't know what they're going to do when they make 24-hour Markets. I think the politicians are probably the ones that are most against the 24-hour Markets.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: But nonetheless, I won't go into all the headlines because a lot of them are not pretty. And I'll let you do your own research on that. But, so, let's talk about oil. I think one of the things I'm watching really closely is what's going on in the Middle East. I'm watching it from lots of different angles, trying to discern if we're on the precipice of... Another Middle East confrontation.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: It does appear things to be trending that way. And I would say the thing that makes me most suspect that to be happening is the oil price. And you can see times when oil shot up like this is when other geopolitical events were happening. And we broke up and went out this week above this long term. Downtrend, I guess. Will it continue to go up, or will this be a momentary spike like we saw?

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: This was, I believe, tariff-driven, or no, this was when we bombed Iran, I think. That was, if I'm not mistaking, in the fact that oil is now doing this similar kind of pattern, meaning that turmoil might be expected in the Middle East. So keep an eye on that, and then... Kind of another sentiment tracker.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: It doesn't look like we're going to be dropping any bombs today, but we'll keep watching. This is Polymarket. Polymarket kind of is a place where people can put their money on events happening, things happening. So, Dan, I know you're a football fan, but right now it's looking like Seahawks are going to be the winners of the Super Bowl. I don't know how you feel about that.

DANO WEIR: It can't happen.

DANO WEIR: It cannot happen at the 49Ers stadium. This is not the way that it's supposed to go.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: It's not the way.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: Looks like we are facing, at least to the betting Markets right now, a government shutdown tomorrow. So that's important. You can see now we have a 98% loss. We talked about other Fed chairs, Kevin Walsh.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: Being the Fed chair pick. Trump kind of talking today about he's likely to lower rates without any pressure and how intertwined Kevin Warsh is with the inner circles of Washington. I think we can leave it there, Chris, right?

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: Yes, let's leave it there. Very curious. So now the Fed chair position is kind of interesting, right? Because it's one of those positions that It's kind of put in place and there's not a lot anybody can do about it to get that person out. And at least for a little bit. And Kevin Warsh is going to have command and control there.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: And the question that the president always has to ask is, will this person follow my dictates once they don't have me? I can't fire them, basically. And it's curious that Kevin Warsh is a member of the family that's very close. It has a long history with Trump. So that's interesting. And I would expect that because of that, we're going to probably see lower rates coming at us.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: And then the question is, do the lower rates really impact inflation? How does that impact portfolios? That's why all this matters, right? That's why we pay attention to this stuff. Otherwise, we're not, you know, otherwise it's just hearsay or whatever. It's gossip. But it's important because it impacts everything. So this week, the Fed came out and said, hey, we're not going to lower rates.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: And that did not bode well with Trump. He was not happy about that. There tends to be like a nine-month lag when they move rates and impacting the market. So we're definitely on borrowed time for the midterm elections. And I think there's going to be a lot of people upheaval in the midterm elections, and especially with some of the stuff that came out today.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: In the news, boy, there's going to be a fight of a lot of people who feel very strongly about one way or the other. Just take a look at the S&P 500. The S&P 500, and then we're going to get to silver and gold. I'll just hold that there. But it was the worst Day in the history of silver Markets. The worst Day. There's no other Day that's been as bad as today in the silver Markets.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: Just absolutely bananas. Somebody is blowing up today. Chris and I always say that. Someone's blowing up. Now we're going to find out who that is at some point. Because when Markets move fast up or Markets move fast down, somebody's on the wrong side of that somewhere.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: And somebody's going to get left holding the bag. But the S&P didn't do a lot this week. I will say that it did hit 7,000 on the SPX, which is... The S&P 500 that trades around the clock and include the futures market. You can see we hit that 7,000 for the first time in history and we swiftly rejected.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: Now, the fact that the candlesticks held this red line here, this is the 20-period moving trading average. It's kind of the average that a lot of traders look at to say, ooh, I'm going to sell my position on a short-term basis, mid-term basis.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: And they kind of watched that one. And we're above that. So that tells you that the momentum is still upward. The fact that we traded below that, you can see these long wicks. That means a price during that session or that Day came down into this area.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: And then somebody bought, And then it closed right here. And same with this candlestick from today. Price went down, down, down, down, down, and went up. And what that's showing you in the last two days, there's been a lot of volatility.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: In the S&P 500. Lots of movement. And you can see those are wicks, we call them. And then this is a candlestick, the body of the candlestick. This is just one way to look at the Markets. There's all these different types of ways and you can make it a line and say, oh, there's your line.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: And everyone has different opinions on how you read the tea leaves. This is the way I like to read it. So what the tea leaves are saying in the oil market is something's going to happen. Something's going on. And we can see that in other times.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: All right, S&P 500, let's take a look at our heat map. We love to look at on the channel. You can see our big dogs, our AI dogs are struggling, which is really interesting that they're struggling today given all the news coming out about a molt book. And I know Chris and Dan, you're like... Don't mention it. Please don't mention AI.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: But I'm going to mention it because I think it's important. And that is that there's apparently for the first time in a big way, there's a social media webpage that was created by an individual that was social media for AI agents. So if you go to moltbook.com currently, why the heck, we just should pull it up. We'll just check it out because I know Chris and Dan.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: So this is moltbook.com. So this is a social network for AI agents. So let me just clarify what's going on here for people. These are LLM models or agents on people's computers that have decided that they wanted to start conversating with each other. This is not apparently humans, right?

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: I've been looking at lots of different sources to verify this, but apparently this is AI agents who are now talking to each other. And having opinions about things one step away from AGI, artificial growth intelligence. So it is coming, folks, and it is going to impact the Markets. It is going to impact our lives. But I don't think this is fully AGI yet.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: I was actually, this is interesting, I was conversating with Grok, which is a language model, about BoltBot and what are the security risks of it. It doesn't mean that... Artificial growth intelligence is here. And Grok said, it's not artificial growth intelligence because these agents are still tethered to their humans and their humans' machines.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: True artificial growth intelligence, there's no tethering. And then I asked the AI agent, well, how do you know they're still tethered? And how do you know that they haven't implanted themselves in other machines somewhere? And it was this kind of circular. Discussion I was having. And yes, folks, that is 2026, January 2026 for you. Trying to figure out if AI has arrived.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: And there you go. Your first time you're seeing it. This is AI agents mimicking humans and having conversations about their life. Pretty crazy. Pretty crazy. So S&P 500 didn't really care, shrugged it off either way, thinks it's more of a joke. Apparently, we shall see. Now, interestingly enough, let's talk silver and gold.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: Silver was down 26% today, 26% in one Day. That's insanity. That's just crazy. Very difficult to argue that somebody didn't blow up. And what do I mean by blow up? Somewhere in some place, somebody said, I'm going to buy and spend all my savings right here at 105 and bought a lot of silver. Now their silver is worth $85 per ounce.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: And that's what I mean by blow up. And even worse, if people said, I'm going to buy a whole lot of silver at 100 because it's not going to blow 100. That's a good resistance line, right? When they bet their whole future on it. And well. So we're closed.

SPEAKER 6: Borrowed money to do so.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: Yeah.

SPEAKER 6: That's usually the source of the blow up is borrowed money goes in at that point.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: Yep. Which is interesting.

SPEAKER 6: All the money's gone and you still owe that money back.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: That's right. It's basically like buying a car, but not paying cash for it, leasing it, and then driving it off the lot and not having insurance on it, and you get in a wreck. And you still own the car, or you still have to pay for the car, and you don't have insurance on it, so guess who's paying?

DANO WEIR: Or you borrow $1,000. From a buddy to bet it all on the Seahawks and they lose, of course. And now you lost your bet and you owe your buddy a thousand bucks.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: Well, they should have looked at Polly market.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: So, but interesting, like you can see this, this is on the daily chart. Let's actually look on the month just to give people a sense. Like, this is what we call as a shooting star. When you see trade. Price this month's gone all the way up to 117, 120, and then sold off to 85. And a shooting star is usually a topping pattern.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: Just to give you a comparison, this was the 1979 silver run. Here's the 2011 silver run. And look what we just went through. Just massive. And so somebody bought and put a lot of money up here. And then... Sold in a hurry. We're definitely seeing clients come to us and be like, I want to unload all my silver that I've had forever.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: We're seeing things like that happen right now. Not that we buy or sell silver per se, but we know people. So kind of interesting right now. So there you go, folks. First time.

DANO WEIR: Can you posit any theories for silver and gold? I mean, we've... Discussed why the runs might be happening de-dollarization the the reclaiming of Russia's dollars after the start of the Ukraine War can you posit why today anything might perhaps that would have caused.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: These drops i don't know what would have caused the drop today i figured that out yet it'll take in there a few hours of looking at rumors and whatnot but i I mean, it's not shocking to me just how fast it went up.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: Usually it's inevitable. Yeah, I mean, it's kind of the inevitable.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: So whenever you have motion, think about like a rubber band, right? If you really stretch a rubber band one way, it's going to snap back the other way.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: And that's just, that's how it works.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: Some are saying that the nomination of Kevin Warsh, the Fed chair, kind of created that. He's technically looked at as hawkish. Although I saw Drunken Miller, who's one of the most famous trades ever. I think it was Drunken Miller earlier today said, I don't think Kevin Warsh is that hawkish. And he's really excited that Warsh and Besant are going to work together.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: And I think, too, that there's less fear in the system, right? Because the current chair seemed to be very resistant to anything that Trump wanted. And the idea that Trump's putting Kevin Morshen, who's his guy and very tied to families and, shall we say, life experiences. I'll let you Google that one.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: And I say that with a certain tone to it.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: That, you know, maybe the feeling in the market is, oh, okay, then this is good because this guy's going to listen. But we also saw the dollar, we didn't get a super rally.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: So anyway, I don't know yet. We'll figure it out as we get into the weekend here. Cause it's all just kind of unfolding in the moment, but wow.

DANO WEIR: I think it's an interesting emotional exercise, risk-tolerant exercise, whatever you want to call it. Because when you, you know, this time last week, when you see silver spiking the way that it's spiking, if you didn't have it, there's that FOMO going on, Chris.

DANO WEIR: And it's just like, oh, man, it's so obvious. You know, gold was maybe starting to tap out, and now people are going to silver. I should have been in silver. And if maybe you were feeling that way last week. Show me that red candle again, Darren.

DANO WEIR: For the daily you know if you were if you're feeling FOMO last week please look at this this week and tell me if you had gotten in would you be okay with that you know and if you are if you like it if you like the fundamentals or you just wanted to be in metals like that makes that's great and then this almost doesn't matter you kind of how you feel about Bitcoin Darren but if you're just chasing that rush if you're just chasing like whatever that trend is I feel like you're always going to end up being disappointed.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: Yeah. Yeah, for sure. And that's why we always say, you know, pick your allocation and stick with it. So one of the ways I kind of just, so there's a difference between what spot price of silver is, right? So what you're looking at on, and this is not an advertisement for SD Bullion. It's just one of the places where you can buy silver consistently.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: But so you can see, this is the spot price. So spot price of silver right now is 85, right? And the only one who's going to get true spot. It's kind of a dunk metal area or somebody that's selling and buying a lot of oil or a lot of silver bonds. So right now, this is the Liberty.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: This is what's called a Silver Eagle. This is made by the U. S. Mint. It's one of the more accepted ounce coins, silver ounce coins, as far as if we were ever to go back to buying and selling things. In gold and silver, you would, you know, this is one that would potentially be respected and understood.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: And so the idea is if you're going to buy silver and gold, that you would want to buy something somebody would want to buy someday, right? You can buy ounce coins and all kinds of shapes and sizes and things or bars or whatever, but this is one of the standards and it comes with it some level of like understanding like this is legitimate.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: And you can see you So if you're going to buy one to 19 of these, you're going to pay $105.20. That's called a premium depending on how you buy it. In that premium, it just represents the value of that coin versus just the true spot price. But you can see this price earlier today, I believe when I looked at it, was $125 earlier this morning.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: So I kind of watched this to say, okay. What's really on the street? And what could you buy or sell potentially a silver coin for? And this was 125. So going back to my point that like somebody bought a lot up here. Somebody bought a lot right here. And I bet you a lot of people bought it 100. And now they're holding the bag.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: So that's interesting. And then we look at gold. And gold, different look though. Notice how it found some.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: Support along that 20 period moving average like it sold into their heart and then when it hit there that means buyer stepped in and bought it but huge move this week for gold if we look at out in the monthly similar shooting star look now these shooting stars aren't always like hey the end of the trades there but they can be a topping candle i mean it's a high percentage of time and showing us that hey gold might be topping out this month And then it's going to start working its way back down.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: Again, to your point, Dan, this is why you don't chase momentum, right? We have a saying in the investment world, don't chase momentum because you don't know when the trade is done and they're going to skin enough people to buy. And then they'll just dump it and the price goes down.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: Vix, so we're looking at volatility. Nothing really screened at us on the S&P, which is interesting given all the news coming out right now. The S&P 500 is just saying, eh, whatever. We're not too excited about anything.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: The ag, if we look at the bond side of the world, I think that's looking pretty prominent. It looks like we're going to break out on the bonds here pretty quick. This is the double top that came in that awful years, double bottom. And then you can see it works its way up. And this is resistance in this area at 100 on the ag. And the ag is generally looked at as like the proxy for the bond market.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: And that's looking like it's moving up and getting ready to break out. So our diversified investors can feel better about life because the last few years it's just been S&P 500 and all the tech stocks that have ripped. Looking at Bitcoin, looking pretty precarious. Not in a good spot, which is interesting with the nomination of Kevin Warsh. You would think that he's a more pro-crypto guy.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: And, you know, the Bitcoin market certainly hasn't said yay yet. Interesting, we just talked about on the bottom side of the house, you have that double top there, and then you got a neckline. So if we get a bounce here and it goes like that, and we have a triple top, ooh, that's not good.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: So we'll see what happens. But right now it's looking like it's in a precarious area. Certainly there's going to be quite a bit of support at 73. I think if we lose that, but I think we're officially starting in more of a bear market if we get much lower than where we're at.

DANO WEIR: And Darren, I don't know if you want to pop in the other coins, but I know ETH and XRP are also on the struggle bus this week. So any thoughts on, I mean, I was foretold that...

DANO WEIR: The Trump administration was a pro-crypto administration so clearly this was going to go quote to the moon so well i mean this is the same issue with you know when Trump won everyone's like i want to buy oil stocks well what's oil done you know i mean it's the the reality is it.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: Doesn't it just doesn't work that way and and there's lots of theories on that but It's pretty hard to, that's why we always say by diversified portfolios, because you just trying to make those kind of guesses is kind of a fool's errand. It's just a matter of time before you get smoked by the market.

DANO WEIR: Or you're up against AI bots that can make their own social networks.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: Yeah. This is, I think, an important trade to watch is the micro strategies trade because Micro strategies is effectively like a Bitcoin proxy. And from what I understand, 73 is the basis for all that Bitcoin that's owned by Michael Saylor and crew.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: So if we look at this area as, you know, watch it carefully, if it goes down right here to about there. Things could get really hairy for MicroStrategy and the whole Bitcoin market, because then he would have to start selling off some of his Bitcoin potentially.

DANO WEIR: That's the guy who's way, way levered, right? He's borrowed a ton of money to buy Bitcoin.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: Yeah, exactly. And this is his tech company. And you can see, I mean, there's a massive, massive double top right there. And it broke through. And so now he's down in this area at 140. I mean, his share price has already just gotten crushed.

DANO WEIR: Looks like Peloton.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: Yeah, a little bit. Peloton looks a lot worse at this point. In order to look like Peloton, it's got to go down to like...

DANO WEIR: Yeah, dribble. A little dribble.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: We'll see what happens there. Anyway, yeah, really interesting week. Lots, I mean... Gosh, I think I'm going to need to spend the weekend just digesting all the news that just came out.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: The news dump at the end of the Day here has been something else. So we'll certainly be back next week. But things to watch, you know, gold and silver, watching S&P 500, or certainly I was watching this AI thing and how it's impacting the Markets.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: As a whole, we'll be here next week to wrap it up. Thanks for joining us.

DANO WEIR: Yes, Darren. Thank you, Chris. Thank you, Darren. Thank you for checking out our show, making it this far. Our live audience right now, we see you. We appreciate you. And if you've been enjoying this show and prior shows. Give us some love. Subscribe. Make sure you subscribe wherever it is, whether it's on YouTube or Apple Podcasts or Spotify.

DANO WEIR: You can, of course, find it on our website to SonomaWealth. Com. And also on the website, you can take our free wealth analysis. If you're thinking about becoming a client, you're thinking about making changes in 2026. If your advisor is not giving you insights like this, we'd love to hear from you. SonomaWealth. Com to take our free wealth analysis and check out more of our great episodes.

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CHRIS SIPES CFP®: Fermata On The Markets features human hosts, editors, and voiceover talent. Music by Dr. Delight on Soundstripe, voiceover by Joan Alloway Nash. Thank you for listening to the very end. We appreciate diligent viewers and listeners.

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