Thursday, March 12, 2009

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 time that it never gets quite high enough to gift us with the short sale of our dreams

The E-mini S&P was moderately lower in off-hours trading, but it appeared to be the kind of deftly engineered weightiness that seeks to discover the price at which relatively subdued selling may have exhausted itself. I'll be bullish when it ends,  but as of midnight EDT there was no Hidden Pivot target at which I would have you try to aggressively buck the trend.

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

Yesterday'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

The 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,

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. 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 cocksure, about borrowing short to lend long. More dangerous than the easing itself , however, was the Fed's role in legitimizing and promoting the notion that the country's obvious borrowing binge was healthy and normal. In plain fact, the borrowing grew promiscuously, because it was tied to home values that were rising much