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The Odds Are High the Bottom Is In

In my last couple of articles I mentioned that I was waiting for the S&P to form a swing low as the first confirmation that an intermediate degree bottom had formed. That swing is going to form on the open Monday morning.

Typically the stock market will rally fairly aggressively out of one of these major intermediate bottoms, often gaining 6%-8% in the first 15-20 days. At that point the market will dip down into a half cycle low that will establish the trend line for this particular daily cycle.

Since the dollar is now on the 21st day of its daily cycle it is now overdue for a move down into a short-term low. This should drive the first half of that 6%-8% move, followed by a very short corrective move as the dollar bounces and then rolls over quickly into a another leg down.

That cycle would be due to bottom around the first of the year, and should drive the stock market generally higher until early January at which time we should get a more significant correction, probably as nervousness builds before the next earnings season.

I’ve diagrammed the general directions and rough targets for what I think will unfold over the next month and a half in the chart below.

However, the dollar shouldn’t put in the true yearly cycle low until sometime in mid February to early March so there should be another leg down after the one bottoming in January.

The final leg down on the dollar index into its yearly cycle low should drive the stock market back to at least marginal new highs later this spring.

Back in June when the CRB made its final three year cycle low I said at the time that this should correspond with the three year cycle top in the dollar, which so far has been the case.

We should continue to see the dollar generally heading lower with intermittent bear market rallies until it puts in a final three year cycle low in mid-2014. This should keep the stock market generally moving higher at least until the point where commodity inflation, especially energy, gets to the point it collapses consumer spending. Once that occurs the stock market will start to stagnate and refuse to rise even if the dollar continues to fall. If Bernanke didn’t learn his lesson in 2008 he will continue to print and spike inflation even higher creating the conditions for the next recession.

As has been the case in the 70s and also during the last cyclical bull market in 2007, I think we will probably see the stock market at least test the all-time highs, if not a marginal break above them, before rolling over into what I expect will be a very complex bear marketbottoming sometime in 2015.

Today should be the opportunity to get on board what is likely to be a significant rally over the next 3 weeks and probably a move to new highs over the next 2-3 months.

However I think the really big money will be made in mining stocks as gold should rally enough to make it’s first test of the all time highs at $1900. It’s not unreasonable to think miners will follow and test 640 during this time.

This piece is cross-posted from Gold Scents with permission.

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Ed Dolan Ed Dolan's Econ Blog

Edwin G. Dolan is an economist and educator with a Ph.D. from Yale University. Early in his career, he was a member of the economics faculty at Dartmouth College, the University of Chicago, and George Mason University. From 1990 to 2001, he taught in Moscow, Russia, where he and his wife founded the American Institute of Business and Economics (AIBEc), an independent, not-for-profit MBA program. Since 2001, he has taught at several universities in Europe, including Central European University in Budapest, the University of Economics in Prague, and the Stockholm School of Economics in Riga, where he has an ongoing annual visiting appointment. During breaks in his teaching career, he worked in Washington, D.C. as an economist for the Antitrust Division of the Department of Justice and as a regulatory analyst for the Interstate Commerce Commission, and later served a stint in Almaty as an adviser to the National Bank of Kazakhstan. When not lecturing abroad, he makes his home in San Juan Islands, Washington.

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