Wednesday, April 29, 2009

Here's an interesting note from one Ron Zuziak, biochemist, concerning a subscriber's recommendation of grapefruit seed extract for fortifying one's immune system: "Rick, as a biochemist I can attest to the efficacy of GSE . (grapefruit seed extract) It is great in combatting most bacteria and many viruses. It even is effective to a close strain cousin of anthrax, even though no direct testing on anthrax has been performed to the best of my knowledge. Don's dosage is a good dosage level. I also recommend adding Sambucol and Vitamin C (1000 mg 3x day) and Lysine (1000 mg-2x-3x day.) The later combination is a continued research effort by Dr. Rath, a protege of the famous Dr. Linus Pauling.

I'm not going to try to second-guess this market, since it is being driven by a hundred demons. Although I have my doubts that swine flu eventually will trump them all, I wouldn't lay odds on it.   Regarding gold, we'll continue to set the bar high, since we don't want to be distracted by false signals.

As a minimum downside target for the near term, let's use the ____ Hidden Pivot shown in the chart. The point 'B' I've used is not ideal because it failed to take out the cluster of minor lows recorded a week ago, but the overall pattern has the kind of heft that gives it authority. If the futures overshoot the target by more than 3-4 ticks, expect the selling to continue down to _____, a Hidden Pivot that you could bottom-fish aggressively with an _____ bid and a stop-loss as tight as 1.10 points.

If the stock catches a breeze, it could get to _____ by week's end. That's a Hidden Pivot, and its midpoint sibling at 123.92 has already been exceeded. More immediately, we can try bottom-fishing at _____, the target of a minor corrective pattern. Bid there for 200 shares, stop ____, raising the stop to ____ if the bounce we're expecting materializes and hits 119.65. Minimum price objective: 119.90.

We've been playing cat-and-mouse with Silver Wheaton, trying to get long on weakness rather than on strength. Let's bid 0.60 today for four _____ calls, contingent on the stock trading ____ or higher. If SLW slips below that price lower the bid for the calls to 0.55 and leave it there for the rest of the day. Judging from the way the bids and offers have been mutating intraday, the calls seem to have a following. Seasoned traders undoubtedly covet the series because once ____ calls are acquired, it's possible to sell other call options short against them without taking much risk. The accompanying graph shows a potential bottoming formation for the ____ near 0.60. It's possible to buy and sell options using ABC target calculations just as we do with the underlying stock. FYI, the stock could fall to as low as _____ if it breaches a midpoint support at 7.66 that has held so far.

Gallows humor kept the Rick's Picks chat room from slipping into coma yesterday as the stock market went into yet another soporific dirge. With swine flu metastasizing globally by the hour, there was talk of Black Plague, and also this revolting remedy, attributed to the late George Carlin: "The best way to get your kids immunized against almost everything is to go to India and order food off a street vendor, throw the food on the street, then feed it to your kids."  We much preferred the household remedy of another subscriber, Don C., who considers grapefruit seed extract one of the most potent immune-system boosters commonly available. He says his family has just increased its dosage to 12 drops mixed with six to ten ounces of juice or water, three times daily.  "It has no side effects and is highly effective,"  notes Don: "The best precaution I personally know of."  Detailed, technical information concerning this remedy is available on the Internet.  But do we dare share with you the latest, scarier-than-scary dispatch from Erich Simon, our intrepid bird-flu correspondent? Reading between the headlines, Erich sees pandemic threats that go well beyond what the news media have reported so far. Here's an excerpt from the e-mail message we received from him yesterday:   'News Fatigue'  "Right on schedule, R, Margaret Chan raised the global Pandemic Alert to Phase Four. A couple of observations. First, the decision to raise the alert [originally] was not to have been made until tomorrow, Tuesday. So the situation must be worse than first appeared, and I suspected as much yesterday. Second, Ms. Chan indicated in her summary that the H1N1 in circulation would not necessarily be the virus that would cause the next Pandemic. This is a shocker that has gone over the heads of the mainstream,