Featured Technical Breakdown: Gold
PLUS: This Week's Market Intelligence
Gold:
GLD daily, 200-day SMA, Bollinger Bands (20,2), RSI
Gold closed the week at $401.44, up $2.48 on the day. Here is why the chart is more interesting than the price.
The two levels sitting on top of each other
The upper Bollinger Band sits at $409.33. The 200-day moving average sits at $412.35. Those are three dollars apart, a shelf about 0.7% wide.
That matters because the two lines mean completely different things and they are saying the same thing here. The upper band is a volatility ceiling: it marks two standard deviations above the 20-day average, the level where a move has gone about as far as recent volatility usually carries it. The 200-day is a trend line: the level that separates a recovering market from one still in a downtrend. Gold has to clear both in the same three dollars.
What the rest of the chart says
Gold is still below its 200-day average, and it has been since the spring. Step back and the shape is clear: a long, powerful advance from roughly $180 in late 2023 to a peak near $480 early this year, then a drawdown of more than 20%, and since then a grinding, choppy recovery. Price is now pressing back toward the underside of the trend it lost.
RSI is 63.16. That is firm without being stretched. The classic overbought marker is 70, so momentum has room, but this is not a market at a low from which large moves usually begin.
The bands are wide, spanning about 13.7% of the 20-day average, which tells you volatility is elevated rather than compressed. Wide bands mean moves tend to be violent in both directions. This is not a quiet chart.
Trader Take: The setup is unusually clean because the level is unambiguous. Below $409 to $412, gold is a range trade against a falling ceiling, and rallies into that shelf have been sold since spring. A daily close above $412.35 with the 200-day starting to turn up would be a genuine change of character rather than another bounce. With RSI at 63 rather than 40, you are not being offered a bargain entry here, you are being offered a level to react to. Wide bands argue for smaller size and defined risk, not bigger bets.
Investor Take: Gold is up 0.80% on the year after a round trip of more than 20%. If you hold it as insurance rather than as a growth position, this year has been exactly what insurance looks like when the house does not burn down, and the case for owning it has arguably strengthened. Diesel cracks at an all-time high, the SPR at a 1983 low, national debt at $40 trillion, and central banks still adding to reserves are all reasons the position exists. The mistake would be judging a hedge by whether it went up this year.
Where we sit
We hold gold in all three books and the three positions could not look more different, which is the useful part.
Portfolio 3 holds 19 shares at a $381.21 basis, up 5.31%, a 7% allocation held for 274 days. That is the insurance position and it has done its job quietly.
Portfolio 2 holds a single share carried at a $475.94 basis, currently down $74.60. That share was bought near the highs. We are leaving it there, and showing it to you, because it is an honest record of what buying strength into a top looks like.
Portfolio 1 has no gold position at all now. The wheel we ran there closed out on August 11 after a full cycle: sell a put, take assignment, sell calls against the shares, get called away. Across six legs from May to August it produced $1,496 in realized profit, including a $1,868 loss on the short call that got run over when gold rallied. We wrote that trade up in full in Anatomy of a Trade on August 11, losing leg and all.
Bottom Line
The tape had a good week and the ground underneath it got softer. Both things are in the data.
Nothing here says sell. The trend is up, inflation is cooling at the headline, money is flowing in, and fighting that has been an expensive hobby all year. What the week does say is that the inputs are getting noisier: a consumer survey four points below forecast, a GDP nowcast cut by a quarter in eight days, a rate market pricing hike odds fourteen times higher than cut odds, and diesel at a record while the world’s most important oil chokepoint is under blockade.
That is a reasonable moment to be paid to wait rather than paid to be right. Portfolio 1 finished the week at 4.08% buying power for exactly that reason. Not because we know what happens next, but because after a run like this one the cost of being early is small and the cost of being fully committed into a surprise is not.
Gold at $412.35 is the number we will be watching. Everything else is commentary.
This Week’s Market Intelligence
Inflation came in soft twice this week. CPI and PPI both undershot, the S&P closed at a record, and roughly $2.6 billion flowed back into equity funds after last week’s outflows. That is the story most people will tell you about the week, and it is accurate.
Here is the other set of numbers from the same five days.
University of Michigan consumer sentiment for August came in at 51.0 against 55.0 expected and 55.2 the month before. Current conditions fell to 51.8. Expectations fell to 50.6 from 55.4. That is not a soft patch in a survey, it is close to a five point drop in what households expect, and the whole release came in four points under forecast. In the same release, one-year inflation expectations went up, to 4.3% from 4.2%.
The Atlanta Fed’s GDPNow estimate for the third quarter was cut to +4.3% on Friday, down from +5.8% on August 6. Still a strong number. But that is a quarter of the estimate gone in eight days.
And the rate market has quietly stopped arguing about cuts altogether. Prediction markets now price roughly a 70% chance the Fed simply holds in September, a 29% chance of a 25 basis point hike, and 2% for a cut. Read that again. The live debate is hold versus hike.
So we have record equity prices, cooling headline inflation, households at their gloomiest reading in a long time, rising inflation expectations, and a rate market handicapping a hike. Those things are all true simultaneously. A market can be right about the direction of inflation and still be sitting on ground that is moving.
The thing that got louder this week and almost nobody priced
Energy and the Strait of Hormuz. Late in the week the President said he would soon be “declaring Hormuz Strait a territory of the United States.” The Defense Secretary said the US can hold the blockade as long as needed. The USS George Washington is being sent to replace the USS Abraham Lincoln, which has been deployed more than 250 days. And the US has reportedly lost at least 45 MQ-9 Reaper drones during the Iran conflict, around a quarter of the prewar fleet, worth over $1.3 billion.
Then the number that actually matters for prices: after reports that Yemen’s Houthis attacked an Aramco refinery in Saudi Arabia, diesel crack spreads rose above $98.00, an all-time high.
Diesel is not a headline, it is a cost line. It moves freight, agriculture, construction and every delivered good in the economy. An all-time high in diesel cracks, arriving in the same week that gas hit $4.07 a gallon and the Strategic Petroleum Reserve sat at its lowest level since January 1983, is an inflation input that does not care what this month’s CPI print said.
Equities did not trade on any of it this week. That is worth sitting with rather than dismissing.
Where The Year Actually Stands
Small caps still lead. That has been the quiet trend of 2026 and it survived another week. The spread between the Russell at +22.63% and the S&P at +13.64% is nine points, and it is the single best argument that this rally has been broader than the mega-cap headlines suggest.
Bitcoin remains the outlier, down 30% on the year while equities make records. Anyone who told you crypto was a risk asset that trades with the Nasdaq has had a difficult year explaining that.
The Five Stories That Moved Markets
1 · Stocks reached new highs as inflation cooled
The week’s biggest catalyst was another encouraging round of inflation data. Both CPI and PPI came in softer than expected, easing fears of another immediate Fed rate hike. The S&P 500 responded by climbing to fresh record highs as investors became more comfortable that inflation is moving in the right direction.
Trader Take: The trend remains firmly bullish. As long as inflation continues moderating, pullbacks are likely to attract buyers rather than trigger sustained selling.
Investor Take: Cooling inflation supports higher equity valuations and improves the probability that the Fed can remain on hold. Continue focusing on high-quality businesses while resisting the urge to chase extended names.
2 · AI spending continues to drive the market
This week’s earnings reinforced that the AI investment cycle is far from over. Companies tied to AI infrastructure, including semiconductor equipment, networking, cloud computing and hyperscale data centers, continued reporting strong demand. Analysts now estimate hyperscalers could spend more than $700 billion this year building AI infrastructure.
The financing is getting louder too. AMD announced plans to raise up to $5 billion through a four part bond sale, potentially its largest ever, to fund AI expansion following agreements with Anthropic and Microsoft. The stock rose 6.50% on the news. When a chipmaker borrows five billion dollars to build, the cycle is not slowing, but it is becoming leveraged.
Trader Take: AI remains the market’s leadership group, but earnings reactions have become increasingly selective. Strong numbers alone are no longer enough. Guidance and execution matter.
Investor Take: The secular AI story remains one of the strongest long-term investment themes, but focus on companies generating real cash flow from AI rather than simply talking about it.
3 · Money is flowing back into equities
After last week’s outflows, investors returned aggressively to US stocks. Equity funds recorded approximately $2.6 billion of net inflows, while growth funds saw their strongest inflows since late 2024. At the same time, technology sector funds saw some profit taking, suggesting institutional investors are broadening their exposure rather than abandoning equities altogether.
Trader Take: Institutional money continues supporting the market. Watch for leadership rotating into industrials, financials and other sectors while technology consolidates.
Investor Take: Healthy bull markets rotate leadership. Diversification may become increasingly important as the rally broadens beyond mega-cap technology.
4 · Treasury yields and retail sales remain the biggest macro risks
Although inflation improved, investors are still closely watching Treasury yields and consumer spending. July retail sales came in softer than expected, raising questions about the strength of the US consumer. Meanwhile the bond market continues to wrestle with whether inflation has cooled enough to keep the Fed comfortably on hold.
The consumer question got sharper on Friday. Michigan sentiment at 51.0 against 55.0 expected is not a rounding error, and expectations falling to 50.6 says households are bracing rather than spending.
Trader Take: Interest rates remain the market’s referee. A sustained move lower in yields would likely benefit technology and other growth sectors, while higher yields could trigger another rotation.
Investor Take: The economy appears to be slowing rather than collapsing. That is generally constructive for long-term investors, provided inflation continues trending lower.
5 · Gold, oil and geopolitics remain important wild cards
Oil remained volatile as markets monitored developments involving Iran and Middle East shipping routes, while gold attracted renewed interest as central banks continued adding to reserves. Although these stories did not dominate equities this week, they remain important variables that could quickly affect inflation expectations and investor sentiment.
We would put this one more strongly than the others. Diesel cracks at an all-time high, the SPR at a 43 year low, gas at a record for the date, and an active blockade of the world’s most important oil chokepoint are not background noise. They are the most likely source of the next inflation surprise, and the equity market spent the week ignoring them entirely.
Trader Take: Energy and precious metals remain tactical trading opportunities driven by headlines. Expect volatility to remain elevated in both markets.
Investor Take: Diversification still matters. Maintaining some exposure to real assets can help balance portfolios if geopolitical tensions or inflation unexpectedly accelerate.
Trusted Voices
Liz Ann Sonders (Charles Schwab) carried the Michigan collapse in full: sentiment 51.0 against 55.0 expected, current conditions 51.8, expectations down to 50.6 from 55.4, and one-year inflation expectations rising to 4.3%. She also flagged the Atlanta Fed cutting its third quarter GDP nowcast to +4.3% from +5.8% on August 6, and described the index as a smooth duck on the surface with a great deal of paddling underneath among the members. That metaphor is doing a lot of work this week.
Charlie Bilello (Creative Planning) on the energy and fiscal backdrop: the Strategic Petroleum Reserve at its lowest since January 1983, down 322 million barrels in five years, a 52% decline. Gas at $4.07 a gallon, the highest ever for this point in August. And the number that dwarfs the rest, US national debt at $40 trillion today against $19 trillion in March 2016.
Danielle DiMartino Booth (QI Research) is looking where the credit actually breaks first. She flagged a construction factoring firm filing for Chapter 11 in Florida, with the dry observation that lenders to construction companies are going under, and separately amplified Bilello’s finding that Miami is now the strongest buyer’s market in America, with home sellers outnumbering buyers by 154%. Small-business credit and regional housing tend to crack well before anything shows up in an index.
Keith McCullough (Hedgeye) stayed short the crypto-treasury proxies, repeating that the storytelling around those balance sheets makes them a good short, and noted his euro position paying off. Whatever you make of the delivery, the positioning has been directionally right while bitcoin sits down 30% on the year.
Walter Bloomberg (@DeItaone) carried the Hormuz escalation as it happened, the diesel crack record, the carrier rotation, and the Fed pricing shift to a 70% hold and 29% hike.
Amit (@amitisinvesting) noted the Saudi sovereign fund disclosed its largest second quarter purchase as 154 million shares of SpaceX, a roughly $25 billion position now representing about 65% of the fund. He also flagged Reddit’s addition to the S&P 500 and a broad software rally, with IGV up 42% from the April lows.
Trusted Voices carries what these strategists actually published this week. We do not paraphrase people into agreeing with us.
What We Actually Did
Thirteen positions closed across both trading books this week, for $5,640 realized.
Four of those rows are negative and we are showing them at the same size as the wins. Two were tail hedges that expired worthless because the market went up, which is the outcome you want when you own insurance and the outcome that never feels good on the statement. One was a Mini VIX structure we closed early rather than carry into settlement. The fourth is the last two legs of the gold wheel netting out, a $1,804 gain on the shares against an $1,868 loss on the call that got run over.
The largest single decision of the week was not a trade at all. Portfolio 1 took profits across the board on Friday and finished the week at 4.08% buying power in use, one of the lowest readings we have published. That is a deliberate move to cash after a long run, not a market call.
Every position, entry, exit and running P&L is on the member dashboard, updated after each trade.
[See the full book at members.growyourpile.com]
Bottom Line
The tape had a good week and the ground underneath it got softer. Both things are in the data.
Nothing here says sell. The trend is up, inflation is cooling at the headline, money is flowing in, and fighting that has been an expensive hobby all year. What the week does say is that the inputs are getting noisier: a consumer survey four points below forecast, a GDP nowcast cut by a quarter in eight days, a rate market pricing hike odds fourteen times higher than cut odds, and diesel at a record while the world’s most important oil chokepoint is under blockade.
That is a reasonable moment to be paid to wait rather than paid to be right. Portfolio 1 finished the week at 4.08% buying power for exactly that reason. Not because we know what happens next, but because after a run like this one the cost of being early is small and the cost of being fully committed into a surprise is not.
Gold at $412.35 is the number we will be watching. Everything else is commentary.
Grow Your Pile publishes every trade in all three portfolios, winners and losers, with entry, exit and running P&L on the member dashboard. Nothing in this email is investment advice or a recommendation to buy or sell any security. Options involve risk and are not suitable for all investors. Selling puts obligates you to purchase 100 shares per contract at the strike price regardless of how far the underlying has fallen, and the maximum loss can far exceed the premium collected. Covered calls cap upside. Futures involve leverage and can produce losses exceeding initial margin. Past performance is not indicative of future results, and results shown are those of our own accounts and are not representative of any subscriber’s results. Read the Characteristics and Risks of Standardized Options before trading.
Tony Battista and Tony Rihan Grow Your Pile