Thursday, November 19, 2009

The note concerning Goldman in today's ES tout bears repeating, to wit:  This market is going nowhere unless Goldman and its unsavory ilk can lead it higher. The daily chart has been looking too weighty to suggest that any such thing is imminent, but we'll have a chance to test this theory when the stock pulls back to 171.63, the nearest midpoint support of consequence.  You can bottom-fish there with a stop-loss suited to taste, but if it's hit look for the weakness to continue down to as low as 161.84. ______ UPDATE (3:05 p.m. EST):  The recommended trade was an easy winner no matter what kind of stop-loss you used, since Goldman bounced $1.09 after bottoming just seven cents below my target.  It has since come back down, with the very bearish implications noted above if the pivot should fail.

After starting the week with a pop to within less than a point of a well-advertised Hidden Pivot at 1113.00, the futures have developed a yellow streak contemplating the next, 1132.25.  This is what happens when the dirtballs who run this carny game can no longer move Goldman $10 in a day.  If the bank stocks are not leading the market higher, then the market is simply not going higher. It's as simple as that.  Bears looking for a heartening sign should cross their fingers and hope the futures dip below 1074.00 today, since that's what it would take to turn the hourly chart bearish.

Someone in the chat room asked for reading in crude, but I can't find anything more in the chart than you can. The December contract has been working on a bullish flag for more than a month, and there's not much more you can say.  If you study the hourly chart closely, you'll see that the tail end of it -- meaning everything from Tuesday on -- has provided camouflage for a long entry at 79.22, with an 80.86 target and a 79.77 midpoint.  This may not portend the beginning of a breakout, but the pattern itself provides a way to bet on it without risking an arm and a leg. _______ UPDATE (1:03 p.m):  Crude made it to 80.53 before diving, so longs, even trailed by a generous stop-loss, would have made money without cooperation from the larger trend.

Gold was getting whacked in the wee hours and looked bound for 1136.60, or perhaps 1134.20  if any lower. You can try bottom-fishing at the lower number, stop 1133.40.  If these Hidden Pivot supports fail to show any pluck, it would suggest that the weakness is likely to spill into next week.  Alternatively, the futures would need to push above 1147.70 today to be in a good position to kick bear butt when the new week begins. ______ UPDATE:  The overnight trade would have worked in theory, since the 80-cent stop-loss caught a rally four times that (i.e., $3.20).  Gold turned sonofabitch thereafter, chopping up bulls and bears alike as it hacked its way lower, changing nothing in a bigger picture that remains bullish.

If we were to pick the one investment most likely to outperform all others over the next hundred or even five hundred years, it would be a painting by Andy Warhol. The artist’s soup cans, Brillo boxes and Marilyn Monroe silkscreens will probably be as recognizable centuries from now as they are today, powerful icons of an age in which beauty itself came to be repudiated by artists and disdained by dealers (if not necessarily by their clients). Perhaps centuries from now, historians and art critics will have a better idea of how this came to be, and how even prestigious museums like the Whitney got hooked on trash. The longer these disturbing trends continue, however, the greater will be the dollar value of Andy Warhol’s works, since, even in their own time, his paintings forcefully evoke a civilization that ran amok aesthetically and morally. Meanwhile, Warhol’s reputation and collectibility appear rock-solid even in hard times. Amidst a deepening global recession, buyers turned out at Sotheby’s last week to bid his paintings into the sky. The featured work, “200 One Dollar Bills,” one of the artist’s first silkscreen paintings, sold for $43.7 million. (I have not reproduced this painting because it is neither more nor less than you might have inferred from its title.) That was more than three times its high estimate of $12 million, and it helped push the auction to an impressive total of $134 million. Other less-prized Warhol works auctioned that night fetched similarly stunning prices. A sketch of roll of cash with a high estimate of $3.5 million drew a winning bid of $4.2 million, and a self-portrait with a top estimate of $1.5 million sold to a London collector for $6.1 million. Can you think of any other market as hot as this one? If