-->By Peter Brimelow, CBS.MarketWatch.com

Gold has followed up its Thanksgiving celebration: Friday's New York close, just over $455, attained a level not seen since early 1988.

But short-term bulls are hard to find. And gold shares were dramatically unimpressed. The AmEx Gold Bugs Index (HUI: news, chart, profile) was down 6.5 percent last week despite a $3.55 bullion gain. Thanksgiving week, it was unchanged despite a $5 rise.

The index closed 10 percent off the years high, even though gold itself is 5 percent higher.

Damage to the junior shares has been worse.

This sickliness in gold shares is currently the gold bears' most influential argument. They revere the alleged forecasting prowess of gold equities.

A case in point: long-term chartist Martin Pring, who is generally not unsympathetic to gold.

Pring unhappily notes in his latest Weekly Intermarket Review:"... the shares made their high many months ago... such divergences have often warned of vulnerability in the past... on Thursday the Share Index was extremely weak and violated a major up trendline... Please forgive us for being unequivocally bearish on the yellow metal over the next few months."

This despite Pring's having no quarrel with the gold price chart itself.

A happy bear is The Gartman Letter, which has no history of sympathy for gold. Assuming gold cannot exceed a short-term uptrend channel it detects, and noting the share weakness, TGL exulted on Friday:"We shall now go on record to say that we have almost certainly seen the highs for gold for weeks, if not months, into the future. $455-456 shall be the highs... against which we can actually sell gold short. At the very least, we'd be not at all surprised to see spot gold trade back very near to the $405-$410 level, over the course of the next month or two."

Gartman's extremely expensive service is said to be influential with (and perhaps influenced by) a number of large and active institutional traders.

The heavy selling on the highs last week suggests someone was acting on Gartman's opinion.

One of the few short-term optimists is the remarkable Australian Web site www.theprivateer.com. Combining erudite and apocalyptical economic commentary with dramatic chart work, this service said Saturday:"$US Gold is now well into the second leg of its post-2001 bull market, and you have literally nothing to worry about."

This comment is linked to a 22-year $5 x3 Point and Figure Gold chart. Designed to display major momentum changes, it is indeed impressive.

Another short-tem bull is www.lemetropolecafe.com 's Bill Murphy. He bases his expectations partly on trading experience. He said on Friday:"I've never seen so many gold bulls who are short-term bearish. The short-term bears outnumber the bulls by an enormous percentage. Having traded markets for 25 years, sometimes in substantial amounts, it would be a first for me to see so many so short-term bears (in a bull market) accommodated, and then allowing them to get long to ride gold back up. Markets don't work that way"

The other reason Murphy is upbeat: continued unflinching offtake from the Indian and Arab physical market (data supplied by my brother John Brimelow. Read a related commentary he wrote.)

Murphy's point: buyers of gold equities are overwhelmingly North American. Buyers of bullion are Indian and Arab.

Can the former be expected to predict the latter? Or will physical demand ultimately prevail?