April 2008

We’ve been bullish on the stock market in recent weeks, but not very. It’s hard to get worked up when you’re convinced, as we are, that the rally may be setting up stocks for a crash from even higher heights. At the moment, however, Hidden Pivot analysis points at least somewhat higher, implying there is a strong but perhaps brief rally ahead that could bring the broad averages to an important top. We haven’t been touting this target as a possible Mother of All Tops because, frankly, that game got old a long time ago. But we are confident nevertheless that our target will be short-able if it’s reached, since the S&Ps have been dancing with Hidden Pivots on the hourly chart recently as though they were Pavlova and Nijinsky.

Yesterday, for instance, the E-Mini S&P hit a 1404.50 rally objective that we’d been touting since mid-April, when the futures were trading 35 points lower. In the recommendation that went out Sunday night, we suggested shorting there with a three-tick stop-loss, risking about $40. As it happened, the high of the day occurred at exactly 1404.75, a single tick above our target. And although the subsequent pullback was relatively gentle, if the short had been covered at the low, it would have returned a profit of about $450 per contract — more than ten times what we had risked, in theory, on entry. Officially, we covered for a profit of $350 per contract. This was done by way of an intraday update disseminated on the Web site when the futures were trading at 1397.50.

We cannot predict whether 1404.50 will turn out to be an important high, but we are pretty confident that if the E-Mini gets past it by more than a few ticks, the rally target alluded to above is likely to be reached, and precisely. If so, it has a good chance of coinciding with rally targets we disseminated earlier for three bellwether stocks: Citigroup, Apple and IBM. Like the S&Ps, each has a bit farther to go before reaching what looks to be daunting Hidden Pivot resistance.

This is the first time such an alignment has occurred in quite a while, and that’s why we’ll be watching closely as the respective targets are approached. We’ve recommended shorts in each, along with specific strategies. In the case of Apple, we already went short last week by naked-selling some May 170 calls for $690 apiece. Because the stock looked so feisty as the week ended, though, we added a long hedge to our position near yesterday’s lows, buying 100 shares @ 170.50 for every two calls we’d shorted earlier. If you do the math, you’ll see that, come May expiration, the position would be profitable with Apple shares trading anywhere between $157 and $183. Our maximum profit would be with the stock at $170 at expiration (it closed yesterday at 172.10), implying a gain of about $1330 per combo.

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Hidden Pivot Seminar May 21-22

Because seats for the recent Hidden Pivot seminar were nearly sold out, I’ll be offering the course again in May ‘ on May 21-22, from 6 p.m. to 9 p.m. Mountain Time. Click here, and then on the ‘Upcoming’ tab to register; or here if you would like more information as well as a detailed description of the Hidden Pivot Method and a free Hidden Pivot calculator (our latest model, perfect for beginners).

I put out a fleeting buy signal yesterday on Sirius Satellite Radio after a chart alert I’d set earlier this year warned that the stock was approaching a long-term target at $2.87. SIRI shares were hovering closer to $4.00 when the forecast was made, and although the implied 30 percent drop seemed like overkill, we’ve learned never to second-guess our technical indicators, especially Hidden Pivots. In this instance, those indicators fortunately tempered our enthusiasm for accumulating a stock that had traded as high as $60 during the dot-com boom. It’s hard to imagine Sirius would not be a bargain at these levels, but perhaps not. That’s because SIRI’s funereal dirge yesterday exceeded our Hidden Pivot target at 2.87 by nine cents ‘ a seemingly trivial miss that in our book is as good as a mile.

We stopped ourselves out of the long position after holding it for several hours, although one guy in the Rick’s Picks chat room confessed to having ignored my instruction to exit the trade if SIRI fell even a little, to 2.79. We admonished him gently, noting that our enthusiasm was never so much for the stock itself as for the Hidden Pivot at 2.87 that had looked so promising. The fact that this support was exceeded by a relatively whopping nine cents implies that still-lower prices impend. From a fundamental standpoint, we would infer that it may be yet a while longer before Sirius finds a profitable business model, assuming it ever does.

World-Class Mouth

Expectations for Sirius were nothing less than circus-is-coming-to-town giddy after Howard Stern signed on a couple of years ago. In retrospect, it is clear that it was Stern’s world-class mouth that helped pump up SIRI shares. Indeed, he was as relentless a promoter of the company as he has always been of himself. But so far, Sirius has been a bust. With Stern involved, we can be sure the digital broadcaster’s failure was not caused by satellite radio’s shooting too low relative to popular taste. Perhaps the shock jock should take a lesson from The Donald, arguably the only celebrity in Gotham more obnoxious than Stern himself. Trump has a canny way not only of making his failures sound like successes, but of selling the resulting flotsam to the public at markups that even Bergdorf’s would envy. We e-mailed Howard yesterday morning with a note concerning our longstanding ‘buy’ recommendation on SIRI, but we just didn’t have the heart to tell him about the 8-cent stop-loss.

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A Guru’s Secrets

‘While perusing some of your posts chronologically from months back, I’m truly struck by the remarkable prescience of many of your fearless calls. The results are uncannily accurate. Thanks again for this opportunity to profit from your usually directionally correct analyses. The subscription is worth every penny – and then some.’

– Colin L. MacVeagh, a subscriber

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Want to learn exactly how I do it? Then click here for details concerning next month’s online Hidden Pivot Seminar on May 19-20 (Saturday/Sunday morning). Sign up now while there are still a few seats left. The goal of this course is nothing less than to teach traders and investors of all levels of experience how to forecast stocks and commodities at least as accurately and confidently as those who do it successfully for a living.

With just a cursory understanding of the material taught in the course, and a little bit of follow-up, you will never again have to ask an ‘expert’ what he thinks about a particular stock or ‘the market.’ That’s because you will be better equipped yourself to answer the question simply by looking at a few charts.

The course is not about technical analysis in the conventional sense, with its tired and overly scrutinized trendlines, its familiar oscillators, channels, volume indicators, and all the rest, Rather, it is a way of looking at charts with a fresh eye ‘ to see chartts as ‘art,’ with emphasis on visual elements of harmony, symmetry, and, indeed, beauty. My annotated charts do not look even remotely like those of other technicians, and that is why the ‘buy’ and ’sell’ signals that come from them rarely coincide with those favored and used so ineptly by the herd.

Don’t Rely on ‘Experts’

The online class will be a particularly good opportunity for those who were unable to attend my classes last year in New York, Sydney, Vancouver, San Francisco or Denver. If you’ve visited the Rick’s Picks chat room and marveled at the forecasting skill of seminar grads, this course is designed to quickly bring you up to their level. While I cannot guarantee that the course will turn you into a fabulously rich trader, I can promise, as implied above, that with a little diligence and practice, your ability to precisely predict price reversals in stocks, indexes, options and commodities will be at least as good as anyone whose forecasts you have ever paid for.

Although the on-site course was offered for as much as $2,000, I am offering it online for $960, since many of the expenses incurred in holding ‘live’ seminars ‘ including hotel and travel costs, and the rental of conference facilities — are not a factor. If you are seriously interested in attending, click here for more information, or go directly to the registration page by clicking here, then clicking the ‘UPCOMING’ tab.

We can’t recall the last time we even looked at a trendline, but our friend Peter Eliades mentioned the one below in his latest update, and we just had to see it for ourselves. As it happens, the bullish implications of this graph are somewhat aligned with our own, mechanically bullish, ideas at the moment. We say ‘mechanically bullish’ because, Kudlow & Friends aside, only a deaf, dumb and blind algorithm could be bullish right now, given the parlous state of the economy. So, bullish we are, algorithmically speaking. But not very. In practical terms, this means we think the Dow Industrial Average should be able to grope, claw and stumble its way to at least 13247 before it finally gives up the ghost.

That’s according to a Hidden Pivot calculation, and the target lies about 2.8% above current levels. It is closely coincident with a bullish target we’ve been using for the E-Mini S&P ‘ against all logic and instinct, we would have to concede. Logic and instinct, so essential for enabling one to decide where to cast one’s fly, or how to handle a mugger who has demanded to be taken to your ATM, nearly undid us early in our trading career. But that was before that fateful day in 1990 when we stumbled on the coldy mechanical Hidden Pivot system while gigging frogs in the South Jersey marshlands. The system has been a godsend ever since, mainly because our instincts had been wrong about the timing of major price swings at least 116% of the time.

Armageddon Countdown

Now, armed with a mechanical crystal ball, and knowing that at least 355 Dow points remain before Armageddon, we’ve been preparing for the worst, laying in a supply of bottled water, curing venison, putting up canned peaches and pears ‘ and, of course, attempting to short the heck out of stocks that look like good swan-dive candidates. Citi has always been one of our very favorites in this category, and we are therefore delighted whenever the stock appears to be making headway toward cliff’s edge, much as it seems to be doing right now. The stock is getting perilously close, and on Friday we missed shorting the nasty little bugger by a hair as it inched toward the day’s highs. We’d planned on buying June 27.50 puts for 2.20. Alas, they traded no lower than 2.21 with the stock at its peak, and so, rigidly disciplined traders that we are, we declined to play.

We are comforted by the knowledge that there will always be other opportunities to get short — especially if the Dow is about to tack on another 355 points. But if we’re right about this, we might have to bail out of a short position in Apple that was initiated on Thursday via the naked sale of May 170 calls @ $690. That seemed like quite a lot of juice at the time, but it might not be enough to protect us if Apple fever should once again seize the proletarian mind next week. A source of inspiration for this trade was the recent purchase, by our 13-year-old son, of a 20-inch Mac monitor for $300 plus $40 shipping and handling. This was a used monitor, mind you, but nothing could persuade him to pay $100 less for a much larger, brand-new screen from another manufacturer. Superior as Apple products are, we rank the company’s monopolistically priced goods with Caribbean cruises on the indispensability scale. We had also noticed that the local Apple emporium is so thick with sales people that a customer is apt to be greeted by no fewer than three of them in the space of a ten-minute visit. All things considered, we’d be very surprised if by January at least half of them were not looking for work, or if Apple shares were not trading well below $100.

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Free Chat Room Pass

The Rick’s Picks chat room is the place to be if you’re looking for tradable ideas in real time. Gold and silver traders in particular can benefit, since the room attracts experienced traders from all over the world at all hours of the day, particularly during U.S. market hours. If you would like a free one-day pass to check it out, click here, and then on the green banner.

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Hidden Pivot Seminar May 21-22

Because seats for the recent Hidden Pivot seminar were nearly sold out, I’ll be offering the course again in May ‘ on May 21-22, from 6 p.m. to 9 p.m. Mountain Time. Click here, and then on the ‘Upcoming’ tab to register; or here if you would like more information as well as a detailed description of the Hidden Pivot Method and a free Hidden Pivot calculator (our latest model, perfect for beginners).

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Information and commentary contained herein comes from sources believed to be reliable, but this cannot be guaranteed. Past performance should not be construed as an indicator of future results, so let the buyer beware. Rick’s Picks does not provide investment advice to individuals, nor act as an investment advisor, nor individually advocate the purchase or sale of any security or investment. From time to time, its editor may hold positions in issues referred to in this service, and he may alter or augment them at any time. Investments recommended herein should be made only after consulting with your investment advisor, and only after reviewing the prospectus or financial statements of the company. Rick’s Picks reserves the right to use e-mail endorsements and/or profit claims from its subscribers for marketing purposes. All names will be kept anonymous and only subscribers’ initials will be used unless express written permission has been granted to the contrary. All Contents � 2008, Rick Ackerman. All Rights Reserved. www.rickackerman.com

Citigroup’s shares have rallied 45% since bottoming five weeks ago. That might sound impressive, but the chart below puts it in proper perspective. As you can see, the stock has quite ways to go before long-term investors might be feeling anything close to a sense of relief. Citi lost two-thirds of its value relative to the highs of last summer, but it would need to more than double in value from current levels just to get back to where it was. Miracles do happen, of course, but our inclination, deeply skeptical as we are of any lasting recovery in the banking sector, is to short the bejeezus out of the stock, using a penny-ante stop-loss, each and every time it rallies to a particularly juicy Hidden Pivot.

We’ve had just such a target in mind for the last week or so, and this time for a change it looks as though Citi might actually get there. Detailed trading instructions are included in the ‘actionable advice’ section of today’s Rick’s Picks. Subscribers who were in the chat room yesterday might already be short in Apple from within pennies of yesterday’s high, since, on-the-fly, I advised naked-selling May 170 calls for a tad less than $700 apiece. The options seemed a little pricey considering the stock was trading for less than $169 at the time. But only time will tell, and I’ve recommended an 8.10 stop-loss on the calls in any event.)

Concerning Citi, in the chart above, notice how the entire rally from the $18 low recorded in mid-March has yet to surpass even a single major peak on the daily chart. We’d need to see it get past two of them ‘ to hit 35.30, that is ‘ before we’d believe that the current binge might be something more than a garden-variety bear rally. Until that happens, we’ll be licking our lips every time the stock tacks on a few more dollars of mistaken value.

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Free Chat Room Pass

The Rick’s Picks chat room is the place to be if you’re looking for tradable ideas in real time. Gold and silver traders in particular can benefit, since the room attracts experienced traders from all over the world at all hours of the day, particularly during U.S. market hours. If you would like a free one-day pass to check it out, click here, and then on the green banner.

***

Hidden Pivot Seminar May 21-22

Because seats for the recent Hidden Pivot seminar were nearly sold out, I’ll be offering the course again in May ‘ on May 21-22, from 6 p.m. to 9 p.m. Mountain Time. Click here, and then on the ‘Upcoming’ tab to register; or here if you would like more information as well as a detailed description of the Hidden Pivot Method and a free Hidden Pivot calculator (our latest model, perfect for beginners).

Is it just our imagination, or have the stock market and the election campaign been tracking pretty closely lately? One day, we read that Obama has clinched the nomination; the next, that his name is mud in Pennsylvania. He’s Mr. Clean in a Newsweek feature story, then he gets tarred-and-feathered four days later by the Chicago Tribune for his alleged ties to some sleazy local businessman. At more or less the same time, the stock market soars because ‘the worst is behind us;’ then it tanks three days later because crude oil prices are out of control. Not a week later, it surges anew, supposedly because investors are thrilled when they discover that the big banks are reporting Q1 losses of no more than about $6 billion apiece.

How much more of this schizophrenia are we going to have to put up with? Will the stock market have to break out of its 2008 range before we have a clear winner in the Democratic primaries? Or, conversely, is an Obama victory in the upcoming North Carolina and Indiana ballots needed to send stocks soaring/plummeting decisively? If the picture doesn’t clear up before the Democratic National Convention in Denver this summer, we may be forced to take the gas pipe.

Meanwhile, whatever happens, it can’t happen too soon, since the tedium of the last few weeks seems to be driving Rick’s Picks chat-room denizens to the edge of madness. Try to imagine what your neighborhood would be like if nearly everyone in it spent six hours a day tracking the price movement of Comex Silver on a five-minute bar chart. A snippet of dialogue:

Harry: Say, Bob, it looks like that pear tree of yours survived another Colorado winter.

Bob: A=17.25, B=17.67, C=17.53, D=17.96.

Harry: What time-frame are you using?

Bob: Winter? Wasn’t that the time frame you asked about?

Harry: No, I was just talking about your tree and how it made it through the winter. But now that you mention it, what was the midpoint pivot of that pattern?

Bob: 17.74, Harry, but that’s assuming you only wanted it to two decimal places?

Doc: I got 17.77 for ‘D’. Are my numbers correct?

Harry: I’m not sure what you did to come up with that, Doc, but your lawn looks like it could use aerating.

Doc: Do you mean with a new pattern, then?

Harry: Ask Rick. He’ll know.

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Hidden Pivot Seminar May 21-22

Because seats for the recent Hidden Pivot seminar were nearly sold out, I’ll be offering the course again in May ‘ on May 21-22, from 6 p.m. to 9 p.m. Mountain Time. Click here, and then on the ‘Upcoming’ tab to register; or here if you would like more information as well as a detailed description of the Hidden Pivot Method and a free Hidden Pivot calculator (our latest model, perfect for beginners).

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Free Pass to Rick’s Picks Chat Room

The Rick’s Picks chat room is the place to be if you’re looking for tradable ideas in real time. Gold and silver traders in particular can benefit, since the room attracts experienced traders from all over the world at all hours of the day, particularly during U.S. market hours. If you would like a free one-day pass to check it out, click here, and then on the green banner.

The Dow fell a mere hundred points yesterday ‘ an amazing show of strength, considering the disturbing tenor of the news. For starters, it was reported that existing-home sales for March fell by 2%, pushing the median price down to $200,700, or 7.7% less than a year ago. On the energy front, the price of a barrel of crude set another record, closing at $119.37 a barrel. Airline stocks were in a state of collapse as a result, with the shares of UAL (shown in the chart below) and American Airlines in particular suffering devastating losses. Meanwhile, the Dollar Index was extending its losing streak, hitting a new all-time low versus the euro.

Under the circumstances, we might have expected the Dow to fall by at least 500 points. Instead, it was off by just 100, and a few of the stocks at ground zero, such as Citigroup and Merrill Lynch, actually eked out small gains. This suggests that the bear rally begun in late January still has some life left in it. Whatever the case, cyclical forces that have been holding an avalanche at bay in recent weeks appeared to be a more powerful influence on investors yesterday than any bad news that may have crossed the tape. Wall Street’s mellow attitude reminds us of the old saw, that if you can keep calm while all those around you are panicking, then you probably don’t understand the situation. This would appear to be true in spades right now, given that the Dow is within 12 percent of record highs and continuing to hang tough against recession, a real estate collapse and a dollar headed toward oblivion.

One further, disquieting item that got shoved off the front page yesterday concerned a leap in California foreclosures to their highest level in more than 15 years. Lenders sent out 113,676 default notices in the first quarter, up 39.4% from the 81,550 sent out the previous quarter, and up 143.1 percent from the 46,760 sent in the quarter before that. Our friend and fellow deflationist Jas Jain comments as follows: ‘Since the credit crisis began in August 2007, home prices (on a price/square foot basis) have been steadily dropping at a 20%-40% annual rate, depending on region. There could be some leveling off in prices for few months before the second leg takes prices down more than 50% from their peaks in most areas by year-end. California has been in recession since July 2007 (based on employment data) and should enter an economic depression in 2009. The Housing Bubble kept Silly.con Valley out of the depression after the tech bubble burst, causing employment to fall by 20% in 2001-03. (That is a depression by any definition). This time there is nothing to save the California economy.’

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Hidden Pivot Seminar May 21-22

Because seats for the recent Hidden Pivot seminar were nearly sold out, I’ll be offering the course again in May ‘ on May 21-22, from 6 p.m. to 9 p.m. Mountain Time. Click here, and then on the ‘Upcoming’ tab to register; or here if you would like more information as well as a detailed description of the Hidden Pivot Method and a free Hidden Pivot calculator (our latest model, perfect for beginners).

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Free Pass to Rick’s Picks Chat Room

The Rick’s Picks chat room is the place to be if you’re looking for tradable ideas in real time. Gold and silver traders in particular can benefit, since the room attracts experienced traders from all over the world at all hours of the day, particularly during U.S. market hours. If you would like a free one-day pass to check it out, click here, and then on the green banner.

Bank of America got off easy yesterday after posting a 77% drop in earnings. The stock fell just $1.06, suggesting that investors may have gotten used to big banks routinely announcing multibillion losses every quarter. In B of A’s case, the actual write-downs totaled nearly $8 billion, including $1.91 billion for losses from investment banking and another $6 billion from bad credit. Considering the foregoing, the Wall Street Journal’s market wrap-up was inscrutable: ‘Investors have excused financial firms for some poor earnings reports recently,’ the Journal noted, ‘but they’re not going easy on Bank of America.’

(Click on chart to enlarge)

Maybe it’s a relative thing? After all, when Citi announced a $5.1 billion loss last week, the stock soared. Seen in that light, the two percent markdown of Bank of America shares yesterday might seem pretty harsh. To give B of A it’s due, it has taken a few months for big losses to surface, and although many banks have been drowning in red ink since the beginning of the year, B of A’s problems, whatever they might be, have barely attracted a dishonorable mention on any top ten lists of troubled banks that we’ve come across. Perhaps the spin doctors have been grooming it to take over Lehman Brothers if the need should arise? A dirty job, for sure, but someone’s got to appear qualified for the task.

Short Squeeze Next?

The Dow Industrials fared about the same ‘ which is to say, no worse than prayerful bulls might have hoped. The blue chip average was down a hundred points in the early going, most of the slippage having occurred on the opening bar. But by day’s end the Indoos had recouped all but 24 points of the loss, and we’d be surprised if this show of resilience didn’t help propagate yet another headline short-squeeze by week’s end. If so, we have two rally targets in our sights for the Dow. Using the Mini-Dow futures contract, either or both of the targets can be shorted using stop-losses as tight as a few ticks. If the higher number is reached ‘ and we are pretty confident that it will be ‘ it would put the Industrial Average within less than eight percent of all-time highs. Who knows? Maybe if stocks really go bonkers, the nuttiness will spread into the housing sector?

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Hidden Pivot Seminar May 21-22

Because seats for the recent Hidden Pivot seminar were nearly sold out, I’ll be offering the course again in May ‘ on May 21-22, from 6 p.m. to 9 p.m. Mountain Time. Click here, and then on the ‘Upcoming’ tab to register; or here if you would like more information as well as a detailed description of the Hidden Pivot Method and a free Hidden Pivot calculator (our latest model, perfect for beginners).

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Free Pass to Rick’s Picks Chat Room

The Rick’s Picks chat room is the place to be if you’re looking for tradable ideas in real time. Gold and silver traders in particular can benefit, since the room attracts experienced traders from all over the world at all hours of the day, particularly during U.S. market hours. If you would like a free one-day pass to check it out, click here, and then on the green banner.

The week ended on a felicitous note, since we’d shorted some S&P mini-futures Friday on the exact high of the day, 1398.25. The advice that went out to subscribers the night before, with the S&Ps trading 26 points lower, was as follows: ‘If there’s a reason to go with the flow right now — to follow the lunatics right to the edge of the cliff, if need be — it is the clarity and persuasiveness of the bullish pattern shown in the accompanying chart. The hourly bars yield some of the most reliable targets we’ve seen in this vehicle, and it looks like another doozey is on its way. The actual pivot lies at 1398.25.’

And so it went. The position was showing an unrealized gain of $550 per contract at the final bell, but we’ve learned not to count those chickens before they hatch, since what Mr. Market giveth, Mr. Market might rescind before we’ve had our first cup of coffee Monday morning. Even though we were prepared for the S&P futures to top exactly where they did, Friday’s tidal surge came as surprise, triggered as it was by the announcement that Citi had lost yet another $5 billion in the first quarter. Had we known that such rotten news would greet investors on Friday, we probably would have gone home short the night before. But we would have been dead wrong, and we would have been sporting a brand new orifice before the session was even an hour old. Who knew? For, far from being alarmed by the news, Wall Street took it as reason for celebration.

(Click on chart to enlarge)

We’ve explained here a dozen times that these rallies have just one cause: short covering. Seen in that light, Friday’s surge occurred simply because sellers, having anticipated the worst, had done all their selling before Friday, leaving ‘no one’ to weigh down shares when the bad news came. This is most surely what happened, but here’s the conventional take on the rally, from the Wall Street Journal’s market wrap-up: ‘Analysts say investors are increasingly betting that the worst revelations of credit-related losses are nearing an end on Wall Street� In the eyes of many investors, the months-long process of effectively factoring big losses into financial firms’ share prices has left little reason to continue selling after the announcements of those losses.’

Libor Scandal

If so, the investors who have been doing the betting apparently haven’t been following the news, since there’s a Libor scandal brewing that could decimate some of the biggest banks in the world (other than Citi, of course) and make the corruption that brought down Enron look like an April Fool’s prank in comparison. It now appears that the heads of Euroland’s biggest banks ‘ Sollozzo, Corleone, Tattaglia, Cuneo and Barzini? ‘ conspired to underreport interbank borrowing activity so as to significantly understate the grave liquidity problems that have beset those banks lately. This helped suppressed Libor rates, which are the most widely used interest rates in the world, while masking the desperation of the banks doing the borrowing. However, it has not ameliorated the underlying problem, and news of the scandal caused the London interbank rate to leap as the week drew to a close, hitting borrowers with countless billions in new costs.

Higher Targets

In sharp contrast to bulls, we think the ‘banking mess’ is still in its early stages and that many very large banks will fail before it has run its course. That doesn’t mean U.S. stocks can’t go higher in the meantime, borne aloft by a volatile combination of panicky short-covering and breathtaking stupidity. Indeed, although we ended the week short the S&Ps, we have disseminated a bullish target for next week that leaves plenty of room to rally. We’ll plan on covering our short position on favorable terms Monday, then to rejoin the revelers until the next short-able target is reached.

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Hidden Pivot Seminar May 21-22

Because seats for the recent Hidden Pivot seminar were nearly sold out, I’ll be offering the course again in May ‘ on May 21-22, from 6 p.m. to 9 p.m. Mountain Time. Click here, and then on the ‘Upcoming’ tab to register; or here if you would like more information as well as a detailed description of the Hidden Pivot Method and a free Hidden Pivot calculator. You can also get a free one-day pass to the Rick’s Picks chat room by clicking here, and then on the green banner.

Sometimes we hear on the evening news that the stock market finished up or down only slightly on days when the averages have swung wildly all day. Yesterday was not one of those days. The Dow finished up a mere 1.22 points, and that pretty much tells the story. Most of the vehicles that we trade made their respective highs or lows early in the session, and from that point on, the biggest challenge for anyone monitoring the markets would have been staying awake. If you’re getting a sense of d�j� vu, it might be because we were in almost exactly the same place, both literally and figuratively, a week ago. At the time, we found ourselves hoping that Friday’s traditionally whacky price action would provide some comic relief. It did, and we got our wish in the form of a 250-point drop in the Industrial Average.

Will lightning strike twice as yet another tiresome week draws to a close? We certainly hope so, since we don’t want to be found slumped at our desk, dead of boredom ‘ not with the local weatherman predicting a weekend of sunshine and warm temperatures. That would be a nice change for the Denver area, which usually trips and stumbles its way into summer with a series of snowstorms punctuated by all-too-fleeting periods of spring-like weather.

Jersey Drizzle

We’re not sure where in this country the springtime of poetry actually occurs. In New Jersey, where we grew up, spring was a cold, ceaseless drizzle that eventually gave way to a hot and muggy summer commencing after Memorial Day. Here in Colorado, spring weather is freakish rather than merely drizzly, and it can snow as late as mid-June ‘ did snow, in fact, not long after we moved here in 1999. It was a hot, sunny, windless day, and we were watching our son go through his paces at the local skateboard park. All of a sudden, the temperature dropped 50 degrees in a matter of minutes, swept in by an icy gale and light snow. In our short-sleeve shirts, we huddled behind a Pepsi machine, trying to keep from freezing. It made us briefly nostalgic for the San Francisco earthquakes that used to rattle the dishes every now and again.

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Mac Clone a Hoax?

We wrote here recently about an upstart company named Psystar that was selling Mac clones for $399. But was it all a hoax? That’s a possibility, according to this item reported at www.macobserver.com:

Psystar announced on Monday that they’re selling a Mac clone for US$399 that will run Mac OS X. Now that whole affair appears to be a hoax, according to Gizmodo on Thursday: ‘The Psystar site went off the air for most of Monday. Then the physical address started changing with dizzying frequency. Credit card transactions online were not secure. Finally, the company was unable to take credit card numbers altogether.

“Yesterday, we decided to take it a step further and see if they actually exist, in the physical sense,” Gizmodo wrote. “How could a company so brazenly challenge Apple and have little to no record of actually being a company? We sent the Gizmodo army down there to get pictures of both their supposed addresses, and found that they’re as much vaporware as the Phantom Console of yore.”

Like a detective story unfolding, Gizmodo followed the address changes, checked the physical locations, took pictures and pointed to web links that actually downloaded files. It was all very suspicious. They came to the conclusion that no one should buy anything from Psystar until they’ve cleared everything up.