February 12th, 2012
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COMMENTARY for Thursday

Greenspan Denial Shows Real Chutzpah

by Rick Ackerman on March 12, 2009 2:48 am GMT · 6 comments

We try to read the editorial pages with an open mind, but sometimes it’s more than we can stomach to have to imbibe opinion pieces at all. For instance, there was this repellent headline atop the Wall Street Journal’s op-ed page yesterday: “The Fed Didn’t Cause the Housing Bubble.”  Can you guess who the author was?  None other than Alan Greenspan, who during his tenure made a point of referring to inflated home values as “wealth.”  He also apparently never met and adjustable rate mortgage he didn’t like, probably because they were a key factor in making homes “affordable” for those who could not really afford them. Under the circumstances, for Mr. Greenspan to deny the Fed caused the housing bubble shows real chutzpah, a yiddish term for brazen effrontery. It’s like Michael Corleone testifying that he knew nothing about the deaths of Sollozzo, Tattaglia, Cuneo and Barzini because he was too busy selling olive oil.

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Mr. Greenspan trots out a novel argument in this latest effort to gain exculpation. He asserts that mortgage rates had a mind of their own, and that the easing of administered rates by the Fed did not directly cause them to fall. While this may have been be true in the narrowest technical sense, it is undeniable that Fed-controlled rates set the pace for all types of credit. Moreover, when the Fed charted a course of easing, it created an environment in which financiers grew increasingly confident, if not to say » Read the full article


TODAY'S ACTION for Thursday

Midnight Auto

by Rick Ackerman on March 12, 2009 3:58 am GMT

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Rick's Picks for Thursday
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$GC09J April Gold

by Rick Ackerman on March 12, 2009 3:20 am GMT

gold-wouldnt-need-much-of-a-popThe downside targets given here yesterday remain valid, as do the bottom-fishing opportunities that I detailed with stops. (To find this recommendation or any other in the archive, simply search on “April Gold” or the relevant symbol.)  Concerning bullish prospects for the near term, the fact that yesterday’s rally did not surpass two prior peaks on the hourly chart is discouraging. Still, it wouldn’t take much of a pop Wednesday night or Tuesday morning to remedy that. Let’s set the bar at  923.80 today to alert us when it’s time for bulls to perk up.   On the hourly chart, the ABCs of yesterday’s price action would seem to promise 923.50 (midpoint resistance: 913.30), but I don’t have much confidence in the pattern because the point ‘B’, 913.80 is hanging in space, having failed to exceed the lowermost peak to the left from Tuesday. _______ UPDATE: Here’s a sequence of targets that appears to be playing out early Monday morning (it is currently 2:17 a.m.), with the futures trading  just off a so-far high of 915.60:  917.80…. 920.30….923.50.  The breach of one by more than 3-4 ticks would imply the next is likely to be reached.

$ES E-Mini S&P

by Rick Ackerman on March 12, 2009 3:42 am GMT

one-off-a-in-esYesterday’s tedious chop occurred after the futures had exceeded a peak at 723.75 recorded on March 4. The thrust created a robustly bullish impulse leg in the process, and so we should regard Wednedsay’s ups and downs as consolidation, perhaps for another strong leg up. That said, I don’t see any opportunities at the moment for night owls to catch a ride on the next northbound express. I am looking at a 15-minute chart (see insest) that shows an ABC-ish downtrend; however, like yesterday’s rally in Gold, the A-B impulse leg ends without having exceeded anything interesting to the left of it.  I’ll go out on a limb nonetheless with a prediction — that the futures will take a tradable bounce from 710.25.  This number — which is not a hula number — gets around the non-qualifying ‘B’ by using a one-off A. (Don’t ask.)  _______UPDATE: The expected bounce came in the wee hours off 911.25, a single point higher than anticipated. A little more than an hour into the session, a so-far gutless short squeeze had reached 732.00- but there was short-term potential to as high as 743.00 (later revised in the chat room to 748+).

$TBT UltraShort Lehman 20+ Year Treasury

by Rick Ackerman on March 12, 2009 3:53 am GMT

TBT was in the throes of such a pretty swan dive Wednesday night that I thought I’d take a stab at a target: 45.52. That’s  a Hidden Pivot target, and its accuracy would be affirmed by signs of hesitation at or very near 46.27, the midpoint pivot. I am not recommending aggressive bottom-fishing because the target coincides with Monday’s sideways consolidation. However, if the target is easily exceeded, that would be telegraphing more strength in the underlying bond futures. _______ UPDATE: My target caught the low of the day within 0.05 points.  Since the rally that followed was quite powerful — TBT surged 1.19 points, or 2.5%,  in the next 90 minutes — anyone trading this one could have had a pretty good day.

$GS Goldman Sachs

by Rick Ackerman on March 12, 2009 4:33 am GMT

You just know how excited I get whenever this weasel wagon lunges toward $100. You could make a case that it’s headed for 112.31 this time, but we’ve learned over the years that it never gets quite high enough to gift us with the short sale of our dreams. I’m not going to pretend that we’ll be able to do so by way of a tout sent out the night before, however. No sirree, Goldman is far too cagey to yield up its treasure to every Tom Dick & Harry with the bright idea that a company in Goldman’s line of business shouldn’t be trading for more than a pittance. We’ll keep close tabs on the stock intraday, with an eye toward shorting it. My bias is strongly bullish because GS has somewhat exceeded the 92.55 midpoint sibling of the 112.31 target.

$SLW – Silver Wheaton (Last:35.93)

by Rick Ackerman on February 9, 2012 4:24 am GMT

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$GS – Goldman Sachs (Last:116.29)

by Rick Ackerman on February 8, 2012 3:36 am GMT

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Dow Industrial Average (DJIA) price chart with targetsTake any dozen good reasons for being bearish right now and they still don’t equal the bullishness of the chart shown. The undeniably compelling rally objective is 13085, a 4.8% move from current levels, and one can only surmise that the dusting the 12158 midpoint received on the last pullback (12/28) all but clinched a finishing stroke to the higher number. Moreover, it implies that bears shouldn’t get their hopes too high even if, in the next few days, the Dow plummets 324 points to retest the midpoint support. As of now, that would signal not weakness, but a screaming opportunity to get long.  Hard to believe, really, but that’s what the charts say. 


This Just In... for Thursday

Pressure to ‘get these loans done’

by Rick Ackerman on March 12, 2009 3:26 pm GMT

From Macauley’s World:

For those still looking to write loans in volume, the only game in town is government-backed mortgages, mostly those guaranteed by the FHA. But unlike with subprime business, lenders in the FHA program are asked to follow agency rules requiring borrowers to document their income, put up a modest down payment and commit to live in the homes.

“With the onslaught of FHA lending that’s going on right now, they’re bringing in lenders who are not familiar with FHA guidelines,” said David Hail, a vice president of Allied Home Mortgage of Houston, one of the nation’s largest FHA partners. He said the lenders are “under pressure from their builders or buyers to get these loans done. They’re approving loans that they should not be.” » Read the full article


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