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COMMENTARY for Thursday
TODAY'S ACTION for Thursday
PICK OF THE DAY for Thursday
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Rick's Picks for Thursday
The Dollar Index is stealing up on the 76.68 pivot I’d flagged as a bullish trigger, and the action at that price will tell us what may lie in store. If the rally is going to make a serious run at 80, however, it should be able to take on the two peaks shown in the chart without trouble. An uninterrupted thrust past both would affirm that this rally is more than just a flash-in-the-pan. If the rally continues, exceeding yet another peak at 76.99 before day’s end, that should send shorts diving for cover. _______ UPDATE (12:50 p.m. EDT): The 76.68 HP benchmark prevented our getting overly excited about the dollar’s rally. DXY made it only to 76.58, keeping us cautious ahead of today’s nsaty selloff.
A 1019.50 target disseminated via an update yesterday is still my minimum downside objective for the near term. Bottom-fishing there is encouraged, but I’ll leave it up to you to furnish a suitable stop-loss. Incidentally, the target, a Hidden Pivot, coincides precisely with a 0.618 retracement of the rally from October 2’s low. If the support fails, however, the next tradable spot on the way down would be 1012.70, also a Hidden Pivot. _______UPDATE (12:46 p.m. EDT): You go, gold! I was skeptical earlier this morning, when gold’s rally, promising though it seemed, had yet to exceed even a single prior peak on the hourly chart. After getting second wind, however, the futures have surpassed no fewer than three external peaks, plus two more look-to-the-lefters along the wall of Monday’s nasty decline. This is quite bullish, of course, especially in view of the fact that the rally is unfolding without the December contract having achieved a downside target at 1019.50 that had looked all but ordained to me. Meanwhile, the 1074 target that was missed by $2 on the last rally stood to be an important one, and it still is. But Gold is at least suggesting today that it has the energy to re-test the high. If it blows past it, the 1134 pivot that sits above it would become our new minimum objective.
While we speculate about whether the mood of the market has changed significantly, you can see that not much has happened on the 180-minute chart. The futures were noodling near the 1037.75 pivot that I flagged here yesterday as a minimum downside target, but if they go any lower there are no Hidden Pivot supports that can be used with the same degree of confidence. If you’re monitoring the futures for a bullish turn, I’d suggest looking for bullish impulse legs on the 15-minute chart. ______ UPDATE (12:08 a.m. EDT): A closer look at the hourly chart during Wednesday night’s Hidden Pivot webinar revealed two serviceable targets: 1048.50, an HP midpoint that has already been exceeded by a mile; and 1027.75, its ‘D’ sibling. (A=1098.50, B=1057, etc.) _______ FURTHER UPDATE (12:55 P.M. EDT): The 1037.75 target held almost precisely, since the futures never went lower than 1037.25 overnight. I wouldn’t trust this rally any farther than I could heave a Bosendorfer, but for the record, the so far high today of 1059.75 is still two ticks shy of surpassing a first external peak. The lesser charts suggest a stall, at least, at exactly 1063.50.
The bonds will have an opportunity to turn powerfully bullish with a relatively modest push if they can inch up to the launching pad near 121. The chart shows three peaks in fairly close proximity, and if an uninterrupted thrust were to exceed all of them, that would put the futures on track for a shot at 124^00.
A Hidden Pivot at 375.95 looks like a good place to expect a turn, or 371.35 if any lower. The pattern that produced that target looks compelling on the 25-tick bar chart, where A=437.05 and B=400.97. Because the target is still discernible on the hourly chart, however, it has the potential to be an important low. These are high-confidence numbers, so even a small (i.e., 0.11-point) overshoot of the higher number would indicate more downside at least to the next.
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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.
This Just In... for Thursday
Sell half of the Akamai position now, around 22.45. Officially we hold 200 shares with an adjusted cost basis of 16.73. A sale at 22.45 would give us an an adjusted cost basis of 11.01 for the remaining round lot.
Hidden Pivot Webinar & Tutorials
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Behind the Shell Game Lurks a Black Swan
by Rick Ackerman on October 29, 2009 12:07 am GMT · 10 comments
When we half-jokingly talk about DaBoyz and how they are continually manipulating the markets, we sometimes lose sight of the fact that they really are out there, rigging the game so that they cannot lose. However, even as these Masters of the Universe maintain quasi-criminal control over the short- and intermediate-term swings, they understand as we do that there are larger, uncontrollable forces lurking in the form of black swans such as the collapse of Lehman Brothers. A post in the Rick’s Picks forum from Mario Cavolo » Read the full article