Has The Great Rotation Begun?

Originally published at: https://peakprosperity.com/has-the-great-rotation-begun/

I recently opined that January 26th, 2026, was going to be recognized as the day a liquidity tremor rippled across the U.S. financial markets.

Everything trembled at once, at ~ 10:00 a.m. ET. The dollar spiked, so did the yen, gold and silver fell, so did stocks, oil got smoked, and bonds barely reacted at all. These are the signs that ‘something snapped’ beneath the surface.

I have no idea who or what, because it was rather quickly papered over, but the signs were unmistakable.

And now, we have what appears to be another set of liquidity troubles here on February 5th. Equities are getting sold, oil and gas are getting clobbered, the metals are being sold hard, and Bitcoin is getting clobbered, too. But bonds are barely reacting, which would ordinarily be climbing in price if this were a typical market sell-off. But they are not.

This image is from February 5th, 2026, around noon.

So where is all that money going? It’s going to money heaven. At least to the extent that people and firms have borrowed to invest or speculate. When those strategies get nervous, they close out their positions, selling whatever they’ve got, buying interest dries up relative to selling pressure, and things go down in price.

That’s the sort of pattern you see when “liquidity dries up.”

If we look at the one-month returns for equities, we can easily see that there’s a rotation away from technology generally and AI very specifically, and finance to classic defensive stocks…and quite pointedly oil companies too. That’s an interesting thing to note since oil itself hasn’t moved up appreciably over the past year and is well below where it was a full year ago.

This is the sort of Great Rotation you see marking the tops of long bull runs. Big investors and institutions creep away from the sexy, high-flying momentum stocks and instead buy consumer defensive, utilities, REITs, and healthcare stocks.

Meanwhile, significant silver product shortages exist in Europe, Asia, Australia, and the US. But that hasn’t stopped the banksters from slamming paper silver hard, with their usual retinue of sordid tricks.

Those mainly consist of dumping massive volumes of paper contracts across a very tiny window of time late at night.

Last night was no exception, and, of course, there was no halt as ‘required’ by CME rule 589:

“Let it rip!” they said at the CME, as long as it’s to the downside. I have every confidence that a similar move to the upside would have had halts applied religiously.

So tune in to hear more, and find out why having a risk-managed portfolio is a good way to manage the volatility that seems to be headed our way.


Timestamps
00:00 Introduction to Market Volatility
03:00 AI and Software Market Dynamics
05:49 The Impact of Gold and Silver Prices
09:12 Understanding Futures Markets and Price Manipulation
12:05 Global Demand for Precious Metals
14:49 Market Dynamics and Supply Chain Issues
17:47 The Future of Gold and Silver Markets
37:25 Market Resilience and Support Levels
39:43 Strategic Reserves and Economic Independence
44:54 The Importance of Manufacturing and Supply Chains
48:00 Liquidity Crisis and Currency Volatility
50:53 Market Dynamics and Historical Insights
01:01:22 The Future of Small Businesses and Banking Regulations


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Another crash today.
Am I the only one who cannot find Dave’s weekly report in this new website format?

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It was at the top over the weekend, but as soon as it is replace by the latest content, I don’t see it on the home page anymore. By chance I just clicked on Filter and Sort on the top right corner (I am on a laptop) and Dave’s Market Update is the fourth one down. From there you can also click on Market Updates on the left to see all of them.

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Hi Chris, always enjoy your discussion’s with Paul, look forward to them every week.

Just wondering if there was a way for you guys to to schedule your get togethers on Friday afternoon instead of so early. In these volatile times a day or two makes a BIG difference… see todays moves in PM’s, Bitcoin, and others… which makes many of your points seem “dated” already.

Anyway, love your content!

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Regarding your windows experience, you might consider moving to Linux. It’s nice to get away from all the reporting and upselling. If you like the Above Phone, you’ll like Linux for your desktop too!

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Your description of trying to get your “own” MS Word onto the new computer had me climbing the walls. Absolutely cannot stand Microsoft; can barely stand Apple. The beauty of Linux is you own it all and configure it to your own needs: OS, office suite, browsers, media editors, you name it.

With a Linux OS you control, an open sea of dependable FOSS software, and now the ability to generate your own software (using Replit or Lovable or Claude), there is zero reason to be forced into using poorly designed, overly complex, rent-seeking software any longer. That right there is why SAAS is dead.

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You called out Trump’s ‘Project Vault’. Now, I am following this pretty closely, because I have been investing in REE stocks for over eight years. There is a lot of malarkey going on in this space, especially over the past week.

Wednesday last week, [trusted news source of sorts] Reuters comes out and announces that the US government will not guarantee any price floors for REEs. The article is later ‘amended’ [not a correction] with the note that the Department of Energy claimed they have never said this. Several REE execs doubled down to call BS on this.

Exclusive: US moves away from critical mineral price floors, sources say

By then, [US traded] REE stocks had taken a nose dive and the ‘amendment’ to the Reuters hit piece did not seem to stop the decline. So, the Trump administration came out to push the message more forcefully and announced their Project Vault. This time it stuck and stocks rallied.

Since then, however, REE stocks (not just one or two companies) have been in continuous decline. No further news, no ‘amendments’, no changes to the situation.

The best explanation I could come up with is that someone who is well-connected needed REE stocks on the cheap, got Reuters to churn out their hit piece, and expected the ‘amendment’ to their article to fix everything so prices could correct upwards. Then they realised that things had got a little out of control and not enough people had picked up on the narrative change. So, they had to double down and pushed the news about Project Vault. Initially it did the trick, but then the precious metals slam soaked up too much capital.

[US traded] REE is a small industry and very volatile. It’s ‘the new kid’ and when capital is needed elsewhere, it’s the first to get hit.

Would love to hear others’ thoughts on this.

P.S. After I wrote this comment, I came across the below X-post - slightly different framing, but same mechanic (I like his explanation a bit better than my own): Silver, Critical Minerals, and the New Supply Chain War

Chris,
May I suggest either Apache OpenOffice or LibreOffice next go around. Same functionality as MS office without all the bullshit.

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My hearing is not the greatest. When Paul was talking about Crypto not being the brightest anymore, I thought he said “Crisco”. Why is he investing in Crisco?

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A bit flakey?

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AND you don’t have to rely on microsoft for excel, word, powerpoint or whatever. I’ve been using ¨LibreOffice¨ which is a FREE, open-source office program. Works for everything i’m doing.

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The crapification of everything is well underway. Almost no experience I have with tech lately is intrusive, annoying, and insufficiently satiating. I am Turning into a Luddite through experience.

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Ditto. The day Word’s grammar check told me I needed to use more inclusive language, I uninstalled it, canceled my office 356 subscription, and switched to open office

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The reality of exponential growth and exponential debt hasn’t changed. Equities are still WAY over valued. Governments only double down on spending more currency for more debt and more grift because For The Children and Hard Working Americans. Currency created still goes to NOT ME OR YOU first then its purchasing power drops like bat poop over a wet market when you or me can get access to it at a much higher rate than NOT ME OR YOU.

PM is still money and one is also a yuge demanded industrial commodity.

Here’s the tell for me: the Weimar charts just before bread cost a wheel barrow full of paper, gold screamed down and up multiple times during the full frontal confetti-fication. Will the USD and other currencies look exactly the same as Weimar charts? Probably not and maybe because of wars, Israel, DEI flights from Venezuela and Somalia to the US; NGO’s; boo on Dems-boo on Reps; Russia made Epstein, politicians love Jesus or love meatball surgery on kids; ICE; men can get pregnant; fentanyl from Venezuela; crypto; and my personal fave: UFO aliens will save us because we’re not food. IOW, the minute by minute Penn & Teller clear cups and balls trick 24/7 hasn’t changed the rarity of gold and silver and haven’t made it “not money.” Manipulate via immoral and unethical fake PM paper? You betcha. But, I think someday, even the green haired, tattooed, eye-ringed, snot drippers will realize the emperor is bare assed naked and the final Weimar chart will render currency as bird cage flooring and PM as money.

It sucks I bought some PM on Tuesday. But the fundamentals, thanks to El Hombre Pollo’s educational videos are very real and data driven, etc. So I’m not going to hang myself in the garage quite yet.

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Yes, that’s is the game they play.

100%

See also MMTLP, AMG, and GME for further and different sorts of insider shenanigans. It’s deeply frustrating to me that the regulators are about as effective at policing as the FBI.

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Great soundtrack.

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That’s some… yearly Dave… and mayve weekly Dave vibe.

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The Great Simplification
That was a good selection Chris.

95% of people use 5% of Excel’s functionality.
Any spreadsheet program is fine for that.

5% of people are heavy Excel users, utilizing functionality like PowerQuery, PowerPivot, Array Formulas etc. Nothing is a substitute for Excel in that regard.

All statistics are made up by me for illustrative purposes - I didn’t even need Excel for that :slight_smile:

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My desktop PC is dual boot, DebianTrixie/Windows11, but Trixie(& Buster before it) gets internet with no modem, so only PC, ONT, & TV(for audio/video) need voltage.
Windows11 senses a network, but needs the modem.
Trixie has an 8021q kernel module, and a VLAN package(not sure if that’s even needed).
From BASH, or in Konsole,
sudo ifup eno1.10
gets a lease with an expiration time in seconds, but which renews automatically.