This year has started out with a bang with the Dow going up over 100 points on the first trading day for 2018, but there are sectors that went up more than the Dow did Tuesday and are likely to continue to outperform the Dow for the rest of the year.

But in the end, making the big money in the markets means getting into what will become the play of the year before everyone knows about it.

Imagine if you could take a time machine back to January the first of last year and buy Bitcoin at 1,000 or even go back to October and have someone tell you about RIOT stock and buy it before it surged.

Well, you can’t use a time machine, but you can do the next best thing which is do the work no one else will do now and that is to think about what is going to be new and big this year and start to act.

So today let me tell you what I believe is going to be the top performing sector for 2018.

It’s mining stocks – I’m talking about gold and silver mining stocks here.
And let me tell you why.

The GDX gold stock ETF (which I do own) is only starting year three of a new cyclical bull market that began for it in the first quarter of 2016.

Typically in the first year of a bull market, you get huge gains off of the bottom in a short amount of time that are followed by a six to twelve month or even longer of a long drawn out sideways technical analysis consolidation pattern.

Once that consolidation period ends a new bigger and even longer rally tends to happen that lasts for years.

For example, this happened with the US stock market.

In 2009 it went up huge in the spring after putting in a bear market bottom and then went sideways for almost six months in consolidation to breakout again and go up from there.

And Bitcoin actually consolidated for over a year before it broke out early last year!
So what about gold now?

Well after that first big rally in 2016 gold and the GDX ETF both began a sideways move that has been going on for a year.