Good Morning:

• Are you kidding me? WTF is a Chinese spy balloon doing floating over Malmstrom Air Force base where 1/3 of our ICBM silos sit?
• The Orwell Regime and U.S. Military won’t shoot it down because “debris” might scatter and hurt someone in this desolate area. Really?
• What are the possibilities? Maybe President Orwell and the globalist Congress have already sold us to the CCP – and the merger comes later this year.
• Maybe the U.S. military is afraid to shoot down the Chinese balloon because it holds a nuke that might take out our nukes – the perfect “First Strike” strategy. Maybe the balloon will drop its payload anyway with the push of a Chinese button.
• If it is Chinese, did they launch it from one of the thousands of acres of U.S. Farmland they own?
• Think how brilliant that would be. They float a few nukes quietly on weather balloons, ready to take out our main ICBM arsenals at a moment’s notice. It must be hard to smuggle nukes across our secure Southern Border.
• Ask yourself, how many Americans will die because of the Orwell Regime’s woke joke policies?
• You cannot make this up – the Chinese may have already successfully placed something over 1/3 of our nuclear arsenal – quiet as a mouse! This reminds me of the low-tech Al Qaida strategy of turning passenger jets into missiles.
• Maybe President Orwell has agreed to let the Chinese monitor our arsenal to prevent any “misunderstandings.”
• Meanwhile, China appears ready to seize Taiwan – or so we are told.
• Given that nearly everything our current regime tells us is a lie, maybe the balloon isn’t even Chinese.
• Remember, we are supposed to hate China and Russia. Recall that the two countries do not like nanny trannies or sexualizing their children as we do. Russia even stands firm on traditional values like family and church, showing what a terrible country they have become.
• Add this latest balloon crisis to all the other acts of sabotage in this country and worldwide. Just yesterday, LAX had a 45-minute power outage. Another chicken farm burned to the ground in Connecticut a week ago. Every plane in the U.S. was grounded for a few hours the week before that. The same thing happened in Canada and the Philippines on different dates.
• Are our enemies (not the ones in Washington but outside the country) getting ready to invade us? It is always instructive to watch the movie “Red Dawn.”
• The bottom line is that something is brewing that won’t be good for the American People. The Orwell Regime and their globalist cabal are playing with fire.
• With the Fed Meeting now behind us, where are we, and what is next?
• The market climbed the wall of worry from the October low. It has moved as far as a “half segment” (bright green, angled lines) to the 50% retracement of the bear market. Cyan, angled lines mark the full segments.
• The correlation to the 60-year master cycle continues to be greater than 85%. I tend to favor the cycle until proven otherwise. The possibility of an inversion or correlation to 2003 or even 1903 is still possible but seems less likely now, given the bullish behavior of the markets coming into February.
• At the moment, however, the market is a bit ahead of itself. The Weekly Expected Move high is 4153, and the market has exceeded the level materially. As today is the weekly expiration day, the market is expected to visit 4153 as Market Makers, and Dealers look to avoid losses and square their books. The line has already been tagged in Globex overnight.
• Sometimes, the market will dance around the level for most of the day. MMs and Dealers want to close below 4153. And they get their way 70% of the time.
• On a curious note, I have been experimenting with some weather algorithms applied to the markets. These algorithms predict periods of heavy magnetic fields often caused by solar flares and other cyclical phenomena. The idea comes from research conducted by Larry Berg over the past 45 years.
• When combined with BluPrint’s core daily algorithm, the results this year are stunning. I marked the turns from the lower graph above with thumbs up and down symbols on the S&P 500 Futures chart above. Today is one of those turns, so we will see what happens.
• The chart only predicts a turn/reversal from the prior direction coming into the date when the bar touches or exceeds the horizontal line.
• The “M” turn discussed Tuesday can still resolve the nominal 20-week cycle. Still, we may alternatively get a sell-off for a few days contained by the 80-day FLD (cyan line marked on the first chart above. Then the market could move up to complete the cyan line segment and measure move before correcting for a few weeks into mid-March.
• Price segments as potential measured moves can accurately project prices close to the penny. 

Stay tuned and alert. Have a great weekend, and I will be in the trading room Tuesday and Thursday next week.

A.F. Thornton