The character of the pm flipped decidedly negative Thursday into Friday.   Long-term strong stocks like SBGL have taken out their pullback lows in a distributive and rollover pattern.   Fake strong stocks like CDE and other South Africans were completely taken down on (no) ernins reports and now face heavy overhead resistance.  If there is a sector continuation move in store, earnings reports are shrugged off regardless of content.  This now seems pretty obvious that it's been the usual arbitrage , short the weak stocks, and hold up a few strong ones to give some appearance of strength before the whole rally collapses.  You'd be hard pressed to find one of these post-rally, options pinning / shelf patterns in HUI that doesn't end pretty badly once the 20 dma turns down.

    I have regularly scanned price movement from the 1/21/15 highs, and there were a bunch of stocks, including a handful in the Model Portfolio that were were trading above those levels.  That changed Thursday.   About the only things left that would give an appearance of bullishness are NEM, ABX, HL, GUY.to, but these are morphing into just retests of resistance.

    We are at 30% cash, and will likely flatten or move to PHYS our  additional   major holdings in the Model Portfolio and raise that cash / 1x PHYS level to 50% or so.  We slapped on a bearish iron condor on NEM, 10 lots of bear put spreads GDX 23/19 March for a trading short, and have a 20 lot short March call spreads 21/24 on the GDX.

    We were able to expire worthless our 25 short GDXJ Feb monthly puts, and exited the short 25 March GDXJ we had on at a slight profit.  The 30 lot of GDXJ May 28s remain in place 58 delta, and we left in place 35 long March puts from the short March 25 put spreads around the 22 strike. We also left on 20 long puts of GDX 19 strike from (5day) weekly bull put spread we had on last week.    So we're pretty well positioned to capitalize on an accelerated decline into the 19.50 and 18.00 area gaps on GDX, depending how nasty the banksters want to get.

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