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.
From the monthly archives:
November 2009
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.
We’ve been using a Hidden Pivot at 18.560 as a minimum upside projection, but another at 18.535 looks just as likely to impede the rally. A close above it would all but clinch a follow-through to at least 18.560, but a close above that last number would open up a path to as high as 20.765 over the near term.
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Careful now, since, as you can see in the accompanying chart, GLD is very close to achieving the highest target that can be projected using the daily chart. It lies at exactly 115.10, about 2.8% above current levels, and we’ll try to short it if and when the rally gets there. Long-term bulls are advised to lighten up, since it seems highly unlikely that buyers will be able to power past the resistance on first encounter.
A rally target at 1174.90 is still our minimum upside objective, although it has the potential to produce an important top. Night owls looking for a way in can test the water at 1136.80, stop 1136.20, provided 1142.50 is not exceeded to the upside first. If the stop is hit and the futures go just a bit lower, exceeding 1135.40, that would turn the lesser charts decisively negative for the near term. _____ UPDATE (2:00 p.m.): My niggardly stop-loss missed the low of a terrific rally by three ticks. Meanwhile, Harry, weighing in last night in the chat room, had the right idea, since his stop at 1135.80 was protected by a prior low just above it and the round-number stubbornness of 1136.00.
All of you should have noticed by now that the futures are having difficulty mustering a seemly correction after topping two days ago just three ticks from an 1113.00 rally target. This means they want to go higher, of course, and so they will. We should therefore consider the 1132.25 target given here earlier as being in play, and you can trade it however you please. Night owls looking for entree will probably need to zoom down to the one- or three-minute chart to find a pattern subtle enough to yield a low-risk entry opportunity, but please note that all external peaks have been exhausted if you were looking to board with-the-trend.
Has the stock market’s meltdown wrecked the Baby Boomers’ retirement dreams? Not necessarily, provided one is prepared to spend less now and retire at 70 rather than 65. That’s the gist of the plan that my friend Doug Behnfield, has laid out below. Doug, whose back-of-the-napkin thoughts on the economy were featured here last summer, is a top-producing stock broker who has always lived well within his means. Here’s his tough-love advice:
I am going to use as a template for the Baby Boomer, someone my age (55) and in the 80th percentile of household income, which I assume to be about $150,000. Due to the real estate mania and the favoring of real estate “investment” over traditional savings, combined with home equity extraction for consumption, I am guessing that mortgage debt ($200,000) exceeds retirement savings ($100,000) leaving this household upside down by » Read the full article
Our Investment Choice for the Ages: a Warhol
by Rick Ackerman on November 19, 2009 12:01 am GMT · 9 comments
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 » Read the full article