So, Chris, tell us, what are we seeing in precious metals and what are you looking at technically here?

Well, one of the things we've been watching is the bullish wedges that were forming in both gold and in silver.

To us, it was looking like precious metals were coiling and they just needed a catalyst to spring forward.

And I think we started to get that catalyst with the Japanese yen intervention.

where essentially the yen had been devaluing for quite some time.

It was reaching a 40-year low to the dollar, and that was a bridge too far.

And so we saw the Bank of Japan and U.S. Treasury step in to strengthen the yen.

So that... caused a big reduction in oil prices and then we saw like you said the blowout earnings from the likes of amazon and microsoft which helped to really reverse the negative sentiment that was building in the tech space about you know potentially things getting too frothy and the correction that we'd seen from the june highs so those two things together were pretty big catalysts uh i would say for reversing a lot of that negative sentiment that we had brewing two weeks ago

I

would say chief among them right now, Chris, is the ongoing war with Iran, with the U.S. and Israel.

The real issue is we didn't we never really saw oil spike materially above, let's say, 120 or so.

It was brief and then oil prices collapsed.

And the whole thought was that this was going to be a short war.

At least that's what was promised by the Trump administration.

And we've seen escalation on and off again.

Tell us a little bit about some of the concerns that we're seeing there right now.

Chris, why don't you take this positive outlook that Bloomberg has with Javier Blas and explain his reasoning why he thinks oil is going back to normal?

It's not that necessarily oil is getting back to normal, but it's more of explaining what's going on from the lack of oil being over $100 a barrel.

So there's obviously a reason for it.

Given what you're hearing in Iran, the fact that the Strait of Hormuz is supposedly closed, you would expect oil to be higher, but oil has retreated.

West Texas is below $100.

Brent is also.

And the explanation, or at least the most rational one that Wall Street is taking, is that oil has to be getting out somehow from the Strait of Hormuz, that we don't have 100% blockade.

But given what you're seeing, Chris, in the markets right now, what are they telling you from what you see in the charts and what you're reading?

We're getting low, going back to levels that we haven't seen since the '80s, and you particularly highlight June being a very important timetable here that we need to be looking at if we do not see a major breakthrough in the Iran war.

That's correct, Chris.

Um, you know, my, my big concern is that the markets are looking at this as a short-term geopolitical event.

But because we have had the Strait of Hormuz closed for so long, and you've had to shut in well production, that this is not gonna be a short-term energy crisis.

This is now gonna become an intermediate to longer term crisis to restart production, uh, to clear the glut of all these empty tankers that need to flow through the Strait of Hormuz, and to get production levels back to where they are.

But more than that, it- it's not just to get production back.

You have to produce above current demand to replace all of the emergency reserves that have been drawn upon.

And like you point out, it's we're gonna really start hitting some major shortages next month.