Hi-Yo Silver, Away
The Silver Top
Thursday was an absolutely bonkers day in the market. META gapped up massively while MSFT gapped down just as hard. Tech (minus the memory segment of semiconductors, of course) was hit with a sledgehammer, while oil stocks continued to rocket higher.
QQQ dipped perfectly into the buy zone I’ve been watching all week and bounced cleanly off the anchored VWAP and Point of Control from the April lows. Selling pressure faded about an hour into trading, and we saw strong bounces across the board, with tremendous hammer candles forming off key support. I say it all the time, but as long as the major support levels on SPY and QQQ hold, this market is heading higher.
If you’ve been around Real Life Trading long enough, you know that at some point on Thursday I said to myself: if we take out this Thursday candle, the bulls are going to have problems. There’s no reason we should close below the lower wick on SPY and QQQ anytime soon. If that happens, it’s highly likely the 100-day SMA breaks, and once that occurs, the probabilities of a larger correction increase dramatically.
QQQ
Yes, there is clear weakness in parts of tech right now—but there are also pockets of massive strength. AI memory names like MU and SNDK continue to lead, with SNDK gapping up another 20% on earnings after a meteoric 1000% run over the last 150 days! There are enough stocks ripping higher that the market can largely ignore the ones breaking down. GOOGL, TSM, MU, ASML, AMAT, and AMD continue to push higher and prop up the indices, offsetting weakness in names like NFLX and MSFT… at least for now. If you want my deeper thoughts on MSFT from here, check out the video below.
Speaking of things ripping higher, metals have been the talk of the town. Even people who don’t trade are aware of the metal madness, with Costco limiting silver bar purchases to one per customer. Very un-Costco-like—they should at least come in a three-pack.
The bull run in metals has been impressive and extended, and if you’ve stayed bullish throughout, you’ve had an incredible ride. That said, at this point it’s hard to justify new long exposure from a technical perspective. Could prices go higher? Sure. But the risk-reward is now heavily skewed, making fresh longs unattractive.
We saw the largest volume candle in SLV’s history on Monday, and at the time I said we’d likely push above that candle for one final high before topping. That’s exactly what SLV did in both the 2011 and 1980 peaks, and so far this setup is tracking similarly. I’m not saying SLV can’t go higher over time—I just think the long-side risk-reward is largely gone. This is the phase where locking in gains, protecting downside, and waiting for an inevitable retest makes the most sense.
As I said about BTC when it was trading near $120,000, we’re much closer to the end of this run than the beginning.
SLV
Speaking of BTC, it’s doing the exact opposite of metals—much to the chagrin of every Bitcoin bro who has trashed gold for years. BTC just broke the 100-week SMA and is heading lower, perhaps to test Michael Saylor’s average price near $76,000.
If you’ve followed me for any length of time, you know I love BTC. You also know I turned very cautious on October 25th when BTC put in a brutal all-time-high trap. Since then, price has cascaded lower, and I turned outright bearish when it broke the 120-SMA on the 3-day chart—my line in the sand between bull and bear markets. That breakdown trailed me out of my Bitcoin longs and left me with the smallest BTC exposure I’ve had since before 2020.
That said, the time to get cautiously bullish on BTC again may be approaching, even if we’re still in a broader bear market. Even bear markets offer powerful countertrend rallies. If BTC drops below $74,420, it would mark a significant lower low. Bitcoin loves to wick below key levels into liquidity pockets, and the $76k–$69k zone represents major support. That area would also reflect a 41–45% drawdown from the all-time high, which is significant even in bitcoin’s world.
If we reach that zone without a sustained bounce beforehand, the risk-reward would be attractive enough for me to put on a long position—initially targeting a bounce back toward the 100-week SMA near $87k, or potentially a reset of the 120-SMA on the 3-day chart near $100k.
In every BTC bear market so far, price hasn’t bottomed until it tagged, or broke, the 200-week SMA and weekly RSI reached below 33. The 200-week SMA currently sits near $58k. While I think it’s unlikely we reach that level without a meaningful bounce first, with Bitcoin… anything is possible.
BTCUSD
