That 1053.00 target may be so stale by now that it can be shorted without fear of bumping heads with amateur riff-raff. I won’t get in your way by suggesting the usual niggling stop-loss, but let me reiterate that the target itself is as clear and compelling as can be — a bet-the-ranch number if it had been hit last week on the the first try. If you’re superstitious and would rather play the December contract, the equivalent target, a Hidden Pivot, lies at 1048.25. ______ UPDATE (10:16 a.m.): This trade worked beautifully, since the futures have so far fallen 11.25 points after topping at exactly 1053.25 an hour before the day session began. You’re on your own from here, but if you initiated the trade on multilots, save some contracts for a potential four-bagger.
From the monthly archives:
September 2009
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Silver died after topping last week just above a 16.940 target I’d flagged, but the pullback will do no damage to the hourly chart unless it exceeds 15.850 in a downdraft today or tomorrow. Alternatively, the first hint of recovery would come today on a print exceeding 16.730.
The rally in the long bond must have a little ways to go, since this inverse vehicle has an unachieved downside target at 43.18, roughly 6 percent below these levels. If TBT gets there it could provide an excellent camouflage opportunity for bottom-fishing, so stay tuned. Note how the target falls in-between two prior lows, one of them an important one.
Because I’ve hung out a bullish target in the $190s, we should watch closely to see how stubbornly the little sonofabitch bucks weakness in the broad averages. We may have an opportunity to observe and learn Monday morning, since Goldman had already begun to sell off on Friday, well before there were any clues that stocks would get hit Sunday night. If the market drags GS lower, the first Hidden Pivot support where we could try bottom-fishing would be at 172.77, stop 172.66. You’ll be on your own if the order fills and initially goes your way. You should also be watching for signs that a recalcitrant Goldman is keeping the market from falling apart, as might be the case. _______ UPDATE (10:28): After falling shy of our downside target by a relatively paltry 40 cents, Goldman suspiciously did NOT participate in this morning’s phony selloff, thereby telegraphing the broad recovery attempt currently under way.
Gold is feigning weakness Sunday night — or perhaps not — but its downward drift will have no significance, even on the lesser charts, unless it takes out a Hidden Pivot support at 1001.50. Ordinarily that would be a good spot to try bottom-fishing, but not this time due to it close proximity to a visually obvious low made Friday on the way up. There may nevertheless be an opportunity for night owls to board with “camouflage,” so I’ve included a chart that shows how, just in case.
The futures are getting whacked a bit harder than usual Sunday night, hinting that it may be more than a garden-variety shakedown. That doesn’t mean DaBoyz will not find a price at which they can rape fearful sellers — only that the process may require a little more sneakiness than usual. In any event, the hourly chart will remain undisturbed as long as the futures hold above 1027.00. A print below that number would create a bearish impulse leg, however, and it would be especially significant because it would follow a peak that had missed a Hidden Pivot target (i.e., 1053.00) by nearly five points.
We’ve always believed that the stock market’s ups and downs are driven not by anything so mundane as news events or the economy, but by the same mysterious cyclical forces that govern the physical universe. Nevertheless, two rapidly evolving news stories threaten to abruptly reverse Wall Street’s heedless bear rally, which recently entered its seventh month.
The first story concerns the impending collapse of the Obama presidency. Although he ran a very impressive campaign, Mr. Obama appears hell-bent on committing political suicide. The President is clearly obsessed with radically revamping the country’s health » Read the full article
Global Middle Class Glimmers in Distance
Recently, I told the story here of Louis Piro, a Mountain View barber who made millions by plowing every dollar he could save into the shares of growing companies that paid generous dividends. Following is another uncharacteristically bullish column that I wrote for the Sunday San Francisco Examiner around that time, in the late 1990s. It ran under the headline “New Global Middle Class Fuels Stocks,” and its thesis is that U.S. multinationals stood to benefit hugely from the rapid rise of an Asian middle class.
This scenario was delayed by the collapse of the Thai baht in 1997 and the severe Pacific Rim recession that followed. It now looks like it will be delayed even longer by a looming :
Second Great Depression in the U.S. You can judge for yourself whether such optimism is still warranted.
U.S. stocks have been in a scorching, vertical climb for months, confounding the bears and effortlessly vaulting the immediate expectations of the most ardent bulls. What factors might account for this powerful rally? Could there be forces at work besides the steady…
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Jubilant Traders Miss Another Ominous Sign
Yesterday morning, an hour into the new trading week, we covered a small short position in the Diamonds, booking a loss of $92 on some September put options. This speculative bet, initiated on the closing bell Friday, was inspired by a hunch that if Mr. Market really wanted to catch investors with their pants down, the Tuesday after Labor Day would be a perfect time to do it. Alas, even with news that should have been helpful in catalyzing a stock-market plunge, stocks trudged higher. The news concerned consumer credit, and it could have left no doubt about the dire condition of the American consumer. He in fact…
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Gold Waiting to Pounce on Summit’s Failures
With the G-20 meeting in Pittsburgh just two weeks off, we didn’t expect gold’s widely anticipated push past $1000 to be a piece of cake. Indeed, Bernanke & Friends are probably throwing everything they’ve got at gold right now to suppress its price. And for all we know, Uncle Sam has loaned every ingot (supposedly) in Fort Knox to carry-traders at J.P. Morgan and Goldman Sachs. The ability of these well-connected bullion bankers to borrow more or less unlimited quantities of physical gold is for them even better than a license to print money, since money itself is most surely not what it used to be. The feather…
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S&P Rally Nears a Key Benchmark
We’ll know soon whether stocks are about to continue blithely higher, since the S&Ps are stealing up on an important Hidden Pivot target disseminated to Rick’s Picks subscribers a while back. Specifically, we projected a potentially important top in the September E-Mini S&P contract at exactly 1053.00. Yesterday, the futures got as close as 1044.00 before retreating slightly in after-hours trading. The S&Ps and other broad indexes have now closed higher for five consecutive days, testing the resolve of bears while rewarding traders who have stayed with the bullish trend.
Gold Just Messing with Bankers’ Heads
by Rick Ackerman on September 15, 2009 2:27 am GMT · 8 comments
Gold hasn’t made much headway since the beginning of the month, when COMEX futures surged $50 in the space of two days. With the dollar suffering from the vapors, there’s no compelling reason why the December contract should have loitered near $1000 ever since. Granted, that’s a nice, round number, and it probably works smoothly with put-and-call hedges that allow bullion dealers to borrow as much of the stuff as they’d care to without risk. It is the same thing we see on expiration Fridays in the equity options market. When a stock gets “pegged” to a strike price, it’s possible for even small players to transact » Read the full article