With Brad Hoppmann

The dollar did not crash today. It did not even flinch. It just kept grinding higher, closing within a couple percent of its 52-week high, and that one fact is doing more work on this board than any single headline. Our Supercycle Score reads 17 out of 100 this morning, a Strong Headwind, because the score is nothing more than the mirror image of the dollar's own climb. When the dollar sits near the top of its range, the score sits near the bottom. That is the whole trick, and today it is not subtle.

Here is the part that keeps this interesting instead of simply bearish. Look past the dollar and almost everything on the board still moved up today. Crude oil ripped 3.3%, natural gas added another 2%, and gold, silver, copper, palladium, and platinum all closed green in price. A tape like that, with the dollar strong and commodities still catching a bid, is exactly the kind of late-business-cycle lull Jim Rogers would tell you to expect inside a longer supercycle. The multi-year trend, dollar debasement dragging real things higher, does not travel in a straight line. It travels in fits, stalls, and shakeouts, and a strong dollar day is one of the ways the market shakes out the crowd that only shows up when the trade is easy.

The trend readings underneath the board back this up. Our momentum posture on the dollar is 86, green, meaning the greenback is not just up, it is up and accelerating. Gold, silver, copper, and the Nasdaq are all reading soft on that same measure, even after a green day in price. That gap, price up but trend still cool, is the market digesting, not reversing. A Turtle Trader does not exit a primary trend because of one strong countertrend session. You watch, you keep your stop where it belongs, and you let the position tell you when the real move is over.

What to watch: whether the dollar can actually clear its 52-week high on a closing basis in the next few sessions. If it stalls there, the Strong Headwind reading should ease off fast. If it breaks through, expect the Score to press toward the "Ludicrous Headwind" range before the next leg of the supercycle reasserts itself.

The Treasury curve is doing something worth a second look. As of the September 14 close, the 2-year sits at 4.65%, the 10-year at 4.97%, and the 30-year at 5.34%. That puts the 2s10s spread near positive 32 basis points, and the long end has climbed roughly 40 basis points since late June. Long bonds selling off while the dollar rallies is not the most common pairing, and it usually means the market is pricing in either sturdier growth, stickier inflation, or both.

On the calendar: the Fed's rate-setting committee meets on its regular September schedule around this week, and the next Consumer Price Index print is due out in mid-October. Note that these dates are drawn from general knowledge of the Fed and CPI release calendar rather than a live economic calendar feed, so treat them as approximate until confirmed against an official schedule.

Because today's tape shows both a firming dollar and real stress at the long end of the curve, it is worth bringing in Michael J. Howell of CrossBorder Capital, who tracks the global liquidity cycle in his "Capital Wars" framework. Howell's view is that global liquidity, which he pegs near 170 to 190 trillion dollars, moves asset prices more than fundamentals do, because roughly 70 to 80% of market activity is simply refinancing existing debt rather than funding anything new. His own numbers, which are his projections and not settled fact, point to a liquidity peak near 189 trillion dollars, a roughly 33 trillion dollar debt maturity wall in 2026, and roughly 40 trillion dollars of rollovers by 2027. Howell's near-term call is that the liquidity cycle is rolling over into 2027, not melting up over the next twelve months, so today's firm dollar and stressed long bond fit his mechanism about strained balance-sheet capacity better than they fit any quick reversal story.

Positioning data from the weekly Commitment of Traders report is not yet part of this letter. The next scheduled release lands this Friday, September 18, 2026, covering positions as of the prior Tuesday. We will keep flagging the date until it is wired in.

My uncle used to say the Indian River never lies to you, it just doesn't always tell you the whole story at once. That is about where I land on a morning like this one. The dollar is strong, the board is green almost everywhere else, and if you only watched one channel or read one feed you would walk away thinking one of those two things is the whole truth. It is not. It is both, at the same time, same as the river running high and calm on the surface while it is doing something else entirely underneath.

Down around Titusville when I was a kid, launch mornings meant everybody stood in the yard and looked up, no matter what channel was on the TV inside. Coke-TV and Pepsi-TV could argue all they wanted about everything else, but nobody argued about the rocket. These days I don't know that we'd all walk outside for the same thing anymore, and that is the part that actually worries me more than any dollar chart. When the market gets loud on both sides, like it is right now with a strong dollar and a green commodities board sitting side by side, the temptation is to pick the one loud voice that confirms what you already believed and call it a day. The old-timers on the dock never did that. They watched the water, not the argument about the water.

Speaking of things that don't quite add up: some small Florida town this week is probably arguing at a commission meeting about whether a golf cart counts as a legal second vehicle, and somewhere a guy is defending a lawn flamingo collection large enough to need its own zoning variance. That is not a real headline I can point to today, just the honest odds in a state where the news never really needs the help. Same as the dollar and the commodities board: two things that look like they disagree, both true, both worth watching a little longer before you decide which one wins.

Stay with the trend until it tells you otherwise. See you tomorrow.

Data basis: FMP batch quotes and Treasury rates, plus daily OHLC history from a Polygon-style market data API, as of the September 15-16, 2026 close (Treasury curve as of September 14). CCI/posture readings use roughly 48-51 daily bars per instrument; the most recent 3-4 trading days were approximated from the latest quote's session range due to a data-provider lag. The Board uses liquid ETF proxies (UUP, GLD, SLV, CPER, USO, UNG, CORN, SOYB, PALL, PPLT, QQQ, SPY) rather than native futures, since futures-level commodity data required a higher data-provider plan than was available this run.