The Great Disconnect Between Wall Street and Main Street May Soon Be Connected
Today’s Market Pulse in New York: November 20, 2025
While the Trump administration—now ten months into its term—continues to insist the economy is robust, the TV news and the technical reality flashing on my market screens tells a very different story. The majority of the public on Main Street feels the economy is in dire straits, and today, the Bill Cara INSTAT system confirms that sentiment on Wall Street with hard data.
This week, investors are witnessing a broad-based deterioration of market breadth that cannot be ignored.
The Technical Reality: A Unified Breakdown
For the first time after creating the INSTAT system earlier this year, the technical landscape is uniformly negative.
Total alignment: All four major US stock market indexes (S&P 500, NASDAQ, Dow, and Russell 2000) registered identical INSTAT scores of -47.
Systematic Selling: The mean INSTAT score for the 643 individual stocks analyzed is -49.96, with over 82% of companies exhibiting negative technical momentum.
No Hiding Place: Zero instruments within the index grouping registered a positive INSTAT score.
The “Tale of Two Markets”
While the broader market rots from the inside, we are seeing dangerous speculative bubbles in narrow pockets.
The Hype: Quantum computing stocks have gone parabolic. Rigetti Computing (RGTI) is up a staggering 1440% in one year, reminiscent of the worst excesses of the dot-com era.
The Reality: Meanwhile, standard retailers like Bath & Body Works represent the true state of the consumer, collapsing 24% in a single day on fundamental concerns.
The Cara Call: Cash is King (and Queen)
Given this backdrop, my “Defensive Positioning” alert issued earlier deserves specific clarification. When I speak of “Cash,” I am referring to liquid fiat reserves, excluding physical gold (which I also view as a form of cash/liquidity).
In my paper on Bitcoin also earlier today, I recommended 0.5% holding of BTC for institutional accounts and between 1 and 3% for retail accounts. BTC offers liquidity, but is proving to not be a store of value, so the weighting there is far less than what I generally recommend for gold.
Here are my adjusted targets based on investor profile:
Institutional Investors: Hold a minimum 20-25% in cash reserves, and at least half that in physical gold. This is the baseline for professional money managers who must stay invested to some degree.
Retail Investors: You do not have the same mandates as institutions. You should target double the institutional rate—approximately 40-50% cash, and perhaps 20% in physical gold and silver.
Nervous or Elderly Investors: If you cannot afford a drawdown or the stress of this volatility, consider moving to >50% cash. Remember that bear markets may be extreme but recover quickly as happened in 1987 or they may drag on for at least two years as happened in 2000-2002.
Note: These cash percentages are for currency reserves only. As I say, they are in addition to your core holdings in physical gold.
In the following PDF, I add additional information that may be helpful. It’s general information. Feel free to ignore it. I am not your investment advisor.
