Wednesday, November 17, 2010

The Hidden Pivot target at 1.3373 (erroneously given earlier as 1.3773) shown in the chart looks very promising as a place to attempt bottom-fishing with a tight stop-loss. Accordingly, I'll recommend bidding 1.3375, stop 1.3368, day order.  Because the futures have trashed the 1.3574 midpoint, we should also view the target as a minimum downside objective for the near-term. _____ UPDATE: Cancel the bid, since the futures are lifting sharply after having gotten no closer to our target than 1.3444. This is quite bullish and implies that your bias should be toward the buy side if you are seeking for trading opportunities.

I haven't stuck my neck out much today, since there do not appear to be any golden trading opportunities in the offing -- at least, none in the vehicles we track closely. I'll be mostly observing, eager to see whether true panics -- the kind that snowball over a period of several days -- are indeed a thing of the past. My hunch is that some things never go out of style.

Pondering HUI's immediate prospects, we can dispense with the subtleties of Hidden Pivotry and appreciate simple gravity at work, hauling the index down to some key lows near 490 that were recorded in late October.  If they are not going to be tested, the retro-rockets will need to fire either today or tomorrow to keep this vehicle from succumbing.  As I've notedabove, you can see this without having to much think about it.  From an impulse-leg perspective, it would require a further fall of 10 percent, to beneath the 476.40 low made on September 10, to seriously damage the daily chart.

Like Gold and Silver, the E-Mini S&P has done little damage to its daily chart in falling somewhat more than 50 points over the last few days. The picture would darken considerably, however, if the selling persists, driving the futures below 1155.50. That would create a bearish impulse leg of daily-chart degree, as well as make any subsequent bounce a tempting short sale. Trades today will most likely come from the 15-minute chart or lower, since there are no Hidden Pivot targets of consequence nearby. Structural supports exist in the form of prior lows near 1167.00, but their value to us lies only in their potential to become, through subtle breaches, elements of camouflage.

All minor patterns point lower at the moment, but we'll stick with the one yielding a 24.855 target emphasized in the update to yesterday's tout.  It holds no special promise for bottom-fishing, but if you're keen on catching an opportune low, I'd suggest waiting for the turn on the lesser charts and using camouflaging provided thereof to get yourself aboard.

We risked bupkus on the way down yesterday -- a day that should have held few surprises for Rick's Picks subscribers, since we began it with a quite bearish target and a headline that read "Bullion correction has further to go".  Skittish investors may want to notice that the entire decline so far, from the November 9 record high at 1424, has yet to exceed even a single "external" low.  It will take further selling down to at least 1315.50 to accomplish that and create a bearish impulse leg of daily-chart degree.  In the meantime, we'll move to the sidelines, since the value of any Hidden Pivot supports immediately below will be compromised by the close proximity of a key structural supports at 1325.50 and 1315.60.

In a perfect world, the Dow might have plummeted 500 points yesterday while gold and silver took flight like bats out of hell.  Oh well. Sometimes you just have to take what you get. And what we got was a merely moderate selloff in the broad averages accompanied by commensurate weakness in bullion.  Actually, weakness was the story across-the-board, affecting nearly all classes of investment assets. The disinterested observer might have inferred that traders and speculators around the world (investors have become extinct) were strongly in sync, spooked by China’s apparent desire to rein in growth, but also by the re-emergence of critical financial problems for Ireland and Portugal. Assuming investors were indeed of a more or less singular mind – and my apologies if the use of the word “mind” here has offended anyone --  it’s a bloody wonder that U.S. stocks didn’t get pulped. But they didn’t. And although sellers seemed to have had little trouble pushing the Industrial Average down by 200 points, the index seemed hostile to the prospect of giving up any additional ground. At its intraday lows, the Dow was down around 223 points; but most of the day it hovered well above the lows, down 180 or so points (which is where it closed).  Some might have sensed the hand of the Plunge Protection Team in preventing a rout. Perhaps. But who needs a PPT when just a small trickle of liquidity from a glutted banking system can propel shares skyward on any given day? And let’s not overlook the fact that, other than Kudlow,  there are no individual investors in the stock market any longer – only institutional hacks charged with deploying OPM to stay weighted in stocks, even if the earth should open up and swallow Manhattan, Chicago and a few