Wednesday, August 26, 2009

It's getting so difficult to see where this rally might end that perhaps we should expect exactly that either today or tomorrow. One thing seems likely, however -- that the top will follow a key reversal. If so, it would show up first as an a-b impulse leg on the very lesser charts.

Yesterday's spike high poked above a midpoint resistance on the hourly chart at 9605, so its 'D' sibling at _____ will be in play as a rally target as long as 9441 has not been exceeded to the downside.  If it is exceeded, however, your coordinates for a new rally target would be A=9249, B=9576, and C=[value of new low].

Our bearish position was short-lived, since we scratched September 95 puts acquired a day earlier when the Diamonds hit our stop-loss early in the session. There were two more spots where we could try to intercept -- at 96.00, or _____ -- but they come from an ABC pattern that is starting to look too obvious. Better to get long for the pop to the higher number, assuming it comes. This would perhaps be best accomplished using "camouflage" in the first 15 minutes of Wednesday's session, so I'll make that an assignment for pivoteers who are in the chat room at the time.

A bullish target analogous to the one given for December Gold lies at 15.515, and it should be considered a done deal if the futures can close above its sibling midpoint, 14.505.

If nothing else can stop a runaway stock market, there's always the astrologers. Pick any day of the year, and odds are it's circled in red on some star-gazing guru's End of Days calendar. The higher stocks go, the louder their predictions of disaster. Not that we haven't joined the chorus of despair ourselves from time to time. How else is a guru supposed to gin up business during the dog days of summer? At the moment, the sexiest prediction out there is the Mayan apocalypse slated in 2012.  Perhaps the Mayans would have pushed that date back a few years, giving themselves a little extra room, if they'd known that Goldman Sachs - the antichrist at the moment -- would be running the world. Some of you will already know that the date December 21, 2012, marks the final 24 hours of a Mayan calendar that for thousands of years has been counting down a 5,126-year span. The bookstores have at least a dozen titles on this subject, and it seems to have captured the popular imagination in the same way the Y2K scare did. Mind you, this isn't a cycle that's supposed to begin anew; rather, it is simply the end of time. Assuming December 22, 2012 never arrives, then, do we infer that that will suffice to keep mortgage lenders at bay? Or will they be waiting to dun us as soon as the next Big Bang starts to cool?   Looking on the Bright Side Whatever happens, we shouldn't count too heavily on debt forgiveness, since debt collectors are probably even hardier than cockroaches. But there may be a bright side: Spiritual healer Andrew Smith, for one, thinks 2012 will usher in a "true balance between Divine Feminine and Masculine." If so, at least a couple of

A pop to _____ is possible if buyers dominate, and a close above that Hidden Pivot midpoint would indicate _____.  However, as of early Tuesday evening, the futures had slightly exceeded the 944.90 midpoint support of a down-ABC begun at Monday's high, 985.50. If the pivot gives way, that could be telegraphing more slippage to as low as _____. 

There are numerous bullish patterns at work in various time frames, so perhaps we should expect to see the rally fail near these levels (i.e., around $74).   If crude confounds contrarians and breaks loose, however, there would be little to stop the September contract below 75.58, a Hidden Pivot.  Once above that number the closest logical target would be 78.77. _______ UPDATE (10:50 a.m.):  The futures are falling today, and so we might look for a tradable bounce near 71.26 in the DECEMBER contract. That's a clear Hidden Pivot.