Good Friday afternoon everyone (or good Saturday morning for some of you). Of course, the market tainted the day a little bit, by losing a decent chunk of the gains it had managed to tack on earlier this week. Honestly, the market never had a chance today. Not only was it starting to feel the weight of four straight daily gains, a 0.4% slide in March's retail sales plus a dip in consumer sentiment hit the market in the gut when it was already pretty vulnerable. As ugly as it was for the market, we're still not worried - sometimes days like today happen just to cool off a rally before it gets overheated. The uptrend isn't dead yet. Heck, we actually finished the day pointed higher again. Like we said Thursday, until the S&P 500 breaks back under 1570, any pullback is just part of the market's natural ebb and flow. Believe it or not, that's all we've got to say to you about stocks for today. Instead, we're going to devote some time to gold. I hate to be the one to say I told you so, but, I told you so. Back in the February 13th newsletter we wrote: "If the market's just plain-old losing interest in gold - and we think that's the case - then this week's subtle technical bearish clue is the beginning of the end....We're going to be watching and reassessing for the next several days, but we'll go ahead and take a bearish stance on gold, if only to be the contrarian view." Back in the March 4th newsletter we said: "If the support line at $1530 fails to hold up as a floor - and we don't think it will hold - then a move under that mark could bring the whole thing atumblin' down....Bottom line? If the $1569 and then the $1530 floors break, gold could really get ugly, real fast. Unfortunately, that's what we're expecting to unfurl here." Care to guess what happened today? Gold plunged well under that floor at $1539, reaching a low of $1485 in the process. Granted, gold futures pushed up a little off of that low, but the damage has been done. Now that some of gold's permabulls are rattled, the worse the selloff gets, the more the would-be sellers jump ship (fueling the selloff). My prediction from here is a modest bullish retest - maybe even back to $1539 - and then a renewal of the downtrend. The weird part about gold's plunge is that the neither the U.S. dollar nor inflation are rising, nor are they expected to rise anytime soon. This is just the market giving up on a trade that was overblown to begin with. Don't get the wrong idea - we're not simply trying to pat ourselves on the back. Then again, facts are facts. We just enjoy helping traders see something nobody else is even talking about. Keep reading, and you'll get more of the same. Now, as good as we might be here in the free SCN newsletter you're reading right now, we're still not as good as the folks over at the SmallCap Network Elite Opportunity. The analyst team over there at our sister site spends all day, every day analyzing the market and picking stocks. If you're not an SCN EO subscriber then the fact of the matter is, you're not getting all you can out of the market. You can also take a free two-week test drive if you want to see what it's all about. On that note, something occurred to me yesterday about that two-week trial. You can access all of the SmallCap Network Elite Opportunity editions by logging into the site during your trial period. So, if two weeks isn't enough, you can actually go back in the archives and read everything they've written since the beginning. Learn more about it here. Or, copy and paste the following link in your browser: http://www.smallcapnetwork.com/?vmpd_ckstr[click_track]=SCN+Newsletter&vmpd_ckstr_redirect=/pages/SCNEO/v1/ The Week Ahead Well folks, although earnings season may have officially started this week, it's not until this week we'll be up to our eyeballs in earnings data. So far, earnings have been ok, although we saw more misses than beats from last week's major announcements. All in all though, we're pretty much on target. The fact that JPMorgan (JPM) topped estimates and Fastenal (FAST) met estimates is some decent assurance we're not going to get destroyed later on. [I still suspect we're headed for disappointment, but nothing too painful.] The coming week is loaded up pretty well, with 55 major names slated to tell us how they did in Q1. That's too many to show you the schedule within the text, but if you click here you can get the whole thing on a full screen. I can't recommend trying to keep track of all of them; it's just too many. Pick and choose the ones that mean the most to you, and put 'em on your calendar. The week's chock full of economic data too, even if only part of it falls into the 'important' category. We don't care about much until Wednesday when we get a flurry of big-time data, starting with last month's housing starts and building permits. Remember, both have been trending higher for a couple of years now, but the growth pace seems to be slowing a little now. A red flag? Maybe, especially considering we just heard from Wells Fargo (WFC) that last quarter's mortgage business softened a bit. We'll also get March's industrial production and capacity utilization figures on Wednesday. I know most investors don't worry too much about either number, but they should - they're both actually very good barometers of long-term economic activity. In fact, that may be why nobody really cares about them... they're too "bigger picture." If you're a true long-termer though, you should care. We'll have an updated chart and some analysis for you then. Honestly, that's all we see in the way of big stuff. I know a lot of people love to dissect the daylights out of the unemployment claims data that comes out on Thursday, but it's become way too analyzed to do us any real good anymore. That just leaves the FDA calendar, which as you may remember was empty last week. There's a little more in store for this week, starting with the PDUFA date for LEVADEX of Monday, the 15th. The drug, from MAP Pharmaceuticals (MAPP)/Allergan (AGN), is a treatment for acute migraines. The only other items on the schedule for next week aren't final yes/no decisions from the Food and Drug Administration, but rather, decisions from the advisory panel that recommends how the FDA rules on new drugs. The first one is Wednesday's recommendation on the Theravance (THRX) drug Breo, for COPD. Theravance is also seeking approval in Europe, although we don't know when to expect a ruling from the EU. Breo showed significant lung-function improvement in trials, but it was also linked to increased cases of pneumonia. Pneumonia isn't unusual for any COPD patient, however, and it's even less unusual when it's being treated by most COPD drugs. The other advisory panel announcement will come on Thursday, regarding the Endo Health Solutions (ENDP) drug AVEED, for low testosterone. Hopes are high here, but let's not forget the FDA actually rejected AVEED back in 2009 because of anaphylactic reactions and pulmonary oil microembolism among patients using the drug. Endo has probably resolved those safety issues, but you never really know. Here's the thing about Endo Pharmaceuticals and AVEED... the company's got a whole lot of other things on the menu and in the pipeline. Any upside from a recommendation for an approval may be muted. Or, it may catapult the stock. It's all in how the market's feeling at the time. Tax Filing Faceoff I know mid-April can be a miserable time of the year. It's when we all get to fork over too much of our hard-earned money to the IRS. But, since it's not optional, whaddya gonna do, you know? Anyway, as I was crossing the i's and dotting the t's on this year's return - which I'm ashamed to admit I still do on paper - it got me thinking about how easy the tax-filing companies have made life for the average taxpayer. I was even going to dissect the group and then pick the best-looking one for you. Fortunately, John Udovich beat me to the punch and compared H&R Block (HRB) to Intuit (INTU), which is the publisher of the popular TurboTax software. John tells us "in late March, Intuit announced that from January 30 through March 16, sales of TurboTax Online units rose 29% versus the comparable prior-year period while Total TurboTax federal units were up 26% during the same period." That data nugget is encouraging for INTU shareholders, but he points out how H&R Block is no slouch either. His comparison is worth a look no matter how you file taxes. More important, if you haven't filed your 2012 returns yet, then it's time to get rolling.