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COMMENTARY for Friday
TODAY'S ACTION for Friday
Rick's Picks for Friday
Bor-ing. We haven’t got gotten much satisfaction hovering at 1108.25, waiting to lay out shorts at what had seemed to be an obvious an opportune place. The target remains valid, though, and we will find a way to use it if the futures ever get there. Check the chat room and this tout for intraday guidance if the target gets close.
Considering how modest our rally target is, the futures are taking their sweet old time getting there. We should use 1223.90 for now, based on the pattern shown in the accompanying chart. Its sibling midpoint is 1213.20, but an intraday breach has not been sufficient to propel the futures the rest of the way. _______ UPDATE (12:17 p.m. EDT): The futures have broken sharply lower this morning, presumably taking the path of least resistance. We now need to face the music –that the correction could continue down to as low as 1140.10 before strong hands start grabbing for bargains. (See new chart. Here are the coordinates for the downtrend, from the 60-minute chart: A=1263.70 (June 28), B=1185.00, C=1218.80.) The HP midpoint of this pattern is 1179.40, and so that will serve as our minimum downside objective for the near term. A close below it, however, would portend a full-blown retracement to 1140.10. As Gold continues to fall, we should also monitor a lesser midpoint/D pairing (where A=1248.80, from June 30) of 1186.90/1155.00. That midpoint has already been breached by $1.10, but we should stipulate a close below it before inferring the worst.
Two weeks of upward progress, if you could call it that, have failed to produce even a single new, bullish impulse leg on the hourly chart. The futures therefore remain vulnerable to a fall to the trendline we’ve been monitoring, which comes in today at 17.375. Alternatively, it would take a thrust, merely, to 18.845 to send bears diving for cover. ______ UPDATE (1:16 p.m. EDT): Today’s nasty spill actually projects lower than the trendline — to 16.830. The midpoint support at 17.680 will offer bulls a last-ditch opportunity to turn things around, but if it’s breached on a closing basis, brace for more downside to 16.830.
So many speculators must have cursed themselves for not having lucked into $200 AAPL shares on the day of the flash crash that it looks like they aren’t taking any chances this time. Headlines blaring the iPhone boondoggle have actually pushed Lindsay Lohan (if not Mel Gibson) off our tabloid-obsessed nation’s front pages, and yet the stock refuses to dive. Trendline support comes in around 246.90 today, and if the stock continues to resist breaking down, Da Shakedown Artists may have to throw in the towel and pay up for it next week.
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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.
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A Hard Look at ‘Ponzi USA’
by Rick Ackerman on July 16, 2010 1:47 am GMT · 29 comments
Our assertion here yesterday that stock-market bulls have bought into an epic swindle elicited some spirited discussion in the Rick’s Picks forum. We remain dumbfounded by the fact that there are otherwise intelligent people out there — Fred Hapgood, old friend, are you listening? — who think the economy will somehow extricate itself from the morass without our suffering a period of misery equal in severity to the Great Depression. How could anyone believe that the Ponzi scheme being perpetrated by The Government is anything but a brazen deception worthy of Goebbels? Here’s a post from “DG” that throws cold water on some of the fantasies and delusions that so far have helped keep The System nominally afloat:
“Reading the comments in the forum yesterday, I was struck by the nonsense of a comment stating that there was no fraud. Seriously? The real estate boom was not fraudulent, when it is documented that there were fraudulent loans creating fraudulent buyers offering fraudulent prices? Doesn’t that indicate fraudulent price discovery? Isn’t the real estate collapse documenting this? (More than 7 million homes in some state of ‘off-the-market-yet-for-sale’ price discovery?) The credit-crisis duct-tape repair job is not fraudulent when you take from taxpayers, to ‘kinda make whole,’ the same buyers who created the aforementioned fraud?
“Does the bottomless pit of Fannie Mae seem a bit odd? It seems like a house on fire, where they just keep coming with fresh wood from the mill to pile on and destroy more capital. Public pensions? How can someone who for 30 years contributes 8% of an average $50,000 income (for a $120,000 total) realistically expect to spend the following 30 years extracting $80,000 a year? These are better returns than Bernie Madoff offered. (Don’t tweak me on my numbers – they are close enough, and many are far worse.) Not at all possible. (And yet, pensioners somehow think this is more ‘real’ than Social Security.) It is fraud from the beginning, just not stated. Social Security never penciled, which is why it rose from a 1% tax to 15% over 70 years. And it still doesn’t pencil. We could continue for quite a while here (Medicare and Medicare Part D, for example) – the numbers are in the significant fraction of a quadrillion dollars.
Bernanke’s Fraudulent Numbers
“To state that PEs are healthy is silly. That is what Bernanke said over and over about housing 2005-7. YouTube-it and imagine him in a dunce cap. Sure, there were numbers that supported his thesis, but the numbers were based on fraud, which makes the entire argument fraudulent. The dollar is a debt instrument which supports all of these frauds. Either the frauds all get called out and they collapse, or the dollar does it for them. Either way, it is going to be horrible for us Americans. Dow 15000? In what currency and how many barrels of oil will that buy? It simply cannot pencil without a huge haircut in currency devaluation.
“I think the hardest part for all of us is accepting the timing of this slow-motion crisis. History shows that these events take decades to build up and go on long enough for the naysayers to be pronounced wrong because their forecasts of doom have been disproven by time — and then they are right in a blink!. Either you were on the right side, or not, with very little if any time to change. We’ve been warned. HFT has shown us how much time you will have via the ‘flash crash.’ Nuts!”
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