Gold prices may be setting new highs almost daily, but to commodity traders, the shiny metal is just another line on a graph. And it’s a line that’s starting to look very familiar to some traders, who see a pattern similar to one that played out recently with hogs. Prices for pigs flew to new highs, and then started drifting back into the mud.

Seeking Alpha sees patterns in the cornfields:

Gold’s new nominal highs against the greenback made headlines this week, but nobody (well, nobody outside the Ag community, anyway) devoted banner space to previously skyrocketing hog prices. This spring, livestock gained ground and rose to new highs for the decade while gold dithered in a consolidation phase.

The commodities’ roles are now reversed. After a 31% run-up since the top of the year, lean hog prices have reached a plateau around their 10-day moving averages, and now seem ready to work the lower half of their volatility bands. Most troubling for longer-term investors is a tightening price range, often indicative of a pending breakout. . Then there’s that March price gap — increasingly appearing to signal exhaustion — between 74.12 cents and 77.80 cents. The gap is becoming a tempting target for bears.

What does all this mean if you’re not a commodities trader? Pretty much just that you shouldn’t put all of your eggs in one basket. Or don’t buy a pig in a poke. Or whatever. Just diversify.

Gold’s Links to Hogs and Corn [Seeking Alpha]

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