Metals On Open, Wednesday 7 January

Last updated on Jan 7, 2026

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Thankyou 2026, My Work For This Year Is Done Already

by Alex King, CEO, Cestrian Capital Research, Inc

If you mainly owned metals, maybe some crypto and some index ETFs, semiconductor in the mix, oh and sprinkle in some leverage, then you’re likely up more this year already than a pretty good whole-year for the S&P500.

For all the “wait wut??” days that the market visits upon us all, sometimes you just have to shake your head in wonder at how the free money just falls in your lap when you do it right.

Then remind yourself that this is exactly the kind of self-congratulatory euphoria that leads to messing up big time in 5, 4, 3, 2 …. aaand there you go.

One of the reasons I like our algorithmic signal services is that they don’t get despondent or euphoric or bored or overexcited. As long as they have a constant diet of power and coolant then they just keep churning.

I’ll give you three examples of what good looks like right now.

The first, SignalFlow AI Growth, is designed to achieve better-than-market returns in a flat to up S&P500 environment. It picks the top three ETFs from its coverage universe, all large liquid names, nothing weird, nothing leveraged, nothing short. Prints its signal daily after the close and assumes the user places their trades at the next open. From 1 January 2025 to date this algo has returned a little over 70% vs. about 19% for the S&P500. The first few months of that period include backtested data before the service went live. My personal experience of using this algo religiously in live trading since June last year is that I am up some 40% vs. about 18% for the S&P. And my work effort to achieve this has been close to 0. Read the signal, place the trades, go walk the dogs. Rinse and repeat the next day.

The second, YX Commodities, is designed to spot risk-on (bullish) and risk-off (bearish) periods in commodity ETFs - again large, liquid, unlevered names. It covers gold, silver, platinum, palladium, oil, uranium, copper and so forth. Since launch on 10 November last year, this algo has returned +23% vs about 2% in the S&P500. Prints its signal before the New York open, assumes the user places trades at the open.

And finally for today, YX Crypto, which kept its following subscribers out of harm’s way from just before Liquidation Day in October. Whilst Bitcoin and Ether dumped bigly, anyone following this algo was just sat in cash. We have to see whether the new bullishness in crypto is caught correctly by this algo but … the early signs are good.

You don’t have to use algorithms in your work. You can do it all yourself with numbers, charts, advisors, moon phases, whatever works for you. But me? I love them. I don’t run all my investment capital on algorithms, plenty remains discretionary and run according to my own charts and numbers and rune-reading and ley-lines and whatnot. But apportioning some capital to the machine has been a great way to reduce my workload whilst still keeping up rock solid returns. The future may, of course, be different to the past. But you might want to take a look at those algos at the links above.

And you can find the whole gamut of our machine-driven services right here:

Now. Let’s go back to the wetware option and see how markets are digesting the let’s-call-it-an-oil-tanker drama playing out right now in the North Atlantic. Dare anyone Buy The WW3 Dip?