March 2009

The correction went no lower than 100.46 overnight, so we did nothing on the order. The good news is that with Goldman creeping toward the 115 strike and the month of April just hours away, our spread position is fattening just as we might have expected. It could be exited for as much as $10 at the moment, yielding an $800 profit on just two spreads, but we'll let it ride for now, since 115 may act as both a magnet and a leash on the stock

I like the _____ target shown in the chart for bottom-fishing, since the ABC coordinates are subtle and unintuitive. This one is for night owls, and the odds that it will work are going to improve if the futures don't wander above

The 894.80 downside target given here yesterday is still viable and remains my minimum objective for the near term. However, if the futures are going to get out of jeopardy, they'll need to touch

The impulse leg highlighted in the chart looks very promising for night owls, even if a point 'C' high has not yet been established. If the so-far high at 790.00 endures, however, I'd suggest bottom-fishing at

We'll never be entirely comfortable cheerleading bear rallies, but what else can a guru do when stocks want to go higher for all the wrong reasons? Although shares fell hard yesterday, there was little in the sell-off to suggest that the short-squeeze begun three weeks ago is over.  More likely is that the smart money simply fell away on news that the Obama Administration is going to play hardball with the auto manufacturers -- or rather, will pretend to play hardball, since the President has made clear that he's not going to let the car makers go down no matter how grim their prospects. From a technical standpoint Monday's weakness did almost no damage to the S&P 500 Index or the Industrial Average. According to the Hidden Pivot Method that we use to forecast prices, meaningful trend changes in either direction always begin with thrusts that exceed two prior highs or lows. But in the daily chart above, you can see that, so far, the decline of the Industrial Average has yet to surpass even a single prior low. Granted, it has already done so on the hourly chart, and that hints of more selling for perhaps another 1-3 days. But unless the Dow were to fall a further 350 points, and do so this week with nary a pause, we would have little reason to re-think our bear-rally bullishness.  It's Not Just the Charts  It's not just the charts, either.  Quite a few investors evidently believe the worst of the financial crisis is behind us.  Indeed, the stock market's biggest rallies recently have been triggered by ostensibly good news from the banking sector.  Even though nothing occurred recently to discourage such delusional thinking, financial stocks got hit hard yesterday, and our favorite bellwether for fatal hubris, Goldman Sachs, has

As an economist, we rank New York Times hack Paul Krugman right up there with another Nobel prize-winning embarrassment, Yasir Arafat.  In the article below, Mises scholar Robert P. Murphy demolishes one of Krugman’s facile, leftist putdowns of Austrian economics. Austrians Can Explain The Boom and The Bust

Cancel the bid. This morning's low missed our target by 11 cents, bouncing 21 cents so far from 51.86. The target is still valid in theory, but our bottom-fishing edge has been compromised by a "natural" low that will attract support-and-resistance players and other hoi-polloi.

HUI looks like a good bet to reach 361.53, and possibly 393.88, although the move would be delayed if Comex Gold falls to the 894.80 target projected in today's tout. A likely place for the implied consolidation to occur would be down around

Is Best Buy's winning streak over? Quite possibly, since the maximum target we could have projected using the daily chart, 39.28, came within three cents of being reached on last Thursday's gap-up rally. We hadn't noticed this potential exhaustion spike until an e-mail arrived from our friend Zane B., who turned bearish on the stock last week. He is evidently