Member-only content. Please Login or get a free trial of Rick's Picks to view.
An hour or so before yesterday’s close, a hawk-eyed pivoteer found the 1521.25 target show in the chart. Alas, the futures titillated with a last-minute push to 1520.25, leaving too little time to initiate a trade with any hope of exiting comfortably before the close with a gain. Even so, the analytical usefulness of the target remains, since, if it fails to contain short-covering this morning, we should brace for panic buying that could push the futures as high as 1562.25 over the near term. In case you’re interested, that target comes from the hourly chart, where A=1346.00 (May 26).
Perhaps I’ve been beating the bullish drum a bit hard lately? I do it to remind myself – and all of you — that stocks can and will continue to move higher as long as most of us continue to be outraged by the very audaciousness of it. We know the rally cannot be anticipating “recovery,” since even blithering-idiot bulls can see that no recovery is even remotely possibly over the next two or three years for state and local governments. But what does that matter when you have short-covering panics capable of turning bearish head-and-shoulder patterns like the one shown in the chart into launching pads almost overnight? The rally looks hellbent on challenging June’s highs, and I wouldn’t bet too heavily on a failure at this point. In any case, shorting just below these highs looks like Russian roulette to me — with three bullets chambered.
The lunatics were out in force after the close on Thursday, trying frantically to read meaning into the $4.07 billion earnings Google just announced for the second quarter. This beat analysts expectations by a hair, and the company called it a “very good quarter.” However, traders were reluctant as always to act as though any such pronouncement could be taken at face value, and as a result, the stock was gyrating wildly early Thursday evening. It is trading at an indicated 427.41 at the moment, but we’ll go out on a limb with a prediction of 453.32 before buyers are spent for the near term.
Member-only content. Please Login or get a free trial of Rick's Picks to view.
Member-only content. Please Login or get a free trial of Rick's Picks to view.
Take 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.
Member-only content. Please Login or get a free trial of Rick's Picks to view.
The rally off the recent low near 300 shows promise, but we’ll break out the bubbly if and when it clears two peaks made since early June, the higher of which lies at 373.52.
The futures bounced from a low yesterday of 934.50, the precise midpoint of a corrective pattern projecting to 930.80. The latter number is a buy, even if there was no evidence the futures are about to give up that much ground before resuming the uptrend. Camouflage will be tough to find if you want to board with-the-trend, but I’d suggest using a 939.30 print as a breakout indicator.









A Huge Rally? Don’t Laugh…
by Rick Ackerman on July 17, 2009 12:01 am GMT · 10 comments
Just because there are a dozen great reasons to hate stocks right now doesn’t necessarily mean they can’t go much higher. Not only that, the bear rally could continue for quite a while – till 2011 and beyond, even – without distorting the bearish look of the long-term charts one bit. Take a look at the monthly chart below, which shows ten years’ worth of price action in the S&P 500 futures. Nine of those years have seen a bear market brought on by the collapse of tech stocks in 2000. But notice how, when the major bear phase ended two-and-a-half years later, the S&Ps embarked on a rally that lasted five years and which » Read the full article