Big rallies in commodities tend to end with a volatility burst... @3peakstrading made an observation about how these moves finish that I have been chewing on since, because it applies well beyond the asset he was talking about. Gold has had an enormous run. The question everybody asks is whether it has topped, and most people try to answer it with price. Levels, retracements, whether the trend line broke. His tell is volatility rather than price. Rallies in commodities and other trending assets tend to end with a burst of volatility to the upside. The move goes near vertical, implied vol blows out, and that is what a top usually looks like from the inside. Which makes sense once you think about who is trading at that point. A steady trend is people accumulating. A vertical finish is people who cannot bear to miss it any longer, plus anyone short being forced out. That combination produces exactly the frantic two-way risk that makes implied vol explode. The practical consequence is that a rally which is still grinding higher on unremarkable volatility has probably not finished. His read on gold was that we had not seen the blow-out yet, so this might only be the first leg. I would hold that loosely. Plenty of trends end quietly. But asking what volatility is doing at the top of a parabolic move is a better question than asking what price is doing, and hardly anybody asks it.