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From the monthly archives:
November 2011
Traders could have caught a nice ride yesterday from an interim low at 3.387, since it fell within 0.003 points of a Hidden Pivot support flagged in the chat room by ‘Pivoteer’ and amplified in my tout. The subsequent bounce would have been worth as much as $500 per contract if you’d exited before the futures relapsed down to a so-far low of 3.325 Wednesday night. That’s a penny beneath my worst-case bottom, but I still expect a major rally from very near these levels, so camouflageurs are advised to remain diligent. I’ll suggest using the 5-minute chart, since the bars are very thin if you go any lower. If you’d prefer to use UNG, the NatGas ETF, the 7.32 pivot given here yesterday is still the place to look for a tradable turn. ______ UPDATE (11:35 a.m. EST): A ‘camo’ pattern launched at 4:50 a.m. from 3.341 would have triggered a long from 3.386. Half of a four-contract position would have been exited at the ‘p’ midpoint of the pattern, 3.401, and a third contract at 3.430, the ‘D’ target. The remaining contract, adjusted for theoretical gains thus far of 7.50 cents, has an effective cost basis of 3.311. Let it ride for now with a fixed stop at 3.345.
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Although we usually use Hidden Pivots to trade prospective reversal points, I’ll suggest trying something new to break the deathly tedium of this corrective dirge, which is about to enter its fourth week. The pennant formation in the chart shown has picked up no fewer than five price points on the daily chart, and it would pick up a sixth if 1225.50 were reached to the downside today. You can bottom-fish this number with a stop-loss as tight as 1.00 pont. FYI, the slope of the rising line would put our ‘buy’ point at around 1227.00 if the low were to occur on Thursday. A 1267.50 target should be used to get short if the futures instead rally today.
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There was some interest in forecasting Natural Gas prices in the chat room yesterday, so I decided to take a crack at it myself. Lo, the moderately big picture, vivid in the 240-minute chart I’ve reproduced alongside, suggests the December contract is close to a potentially important low. The actual low so far has already exceeded my Hidden Pivot target at 3.416, but not by much, and the pattern itself is sufficiently clear that we should expect a tradable price reversal from somewhere near current levels. Please note that I have allowed room for a somewhat lower low at 3.336 that would result if we use a plausible higher ‘A’ as the starting point of this down-cycle. Let’s try to get long using camouflage tactics near the 3.384 midpoint (5-min, A=3.456, B=3.390, C=3.417) of a pattern identified in the chat room by ‘Pivoteer’.
FYI, an ETF said in the chat room to mimic NatGas futures bears the symbol UNG. If it were to bottom at a target equivalent to the one above at 3.416, the turn would come at around 7.32. This is caveat emptor, since, as I’ve been warning subscribers for years, ETFs were created for the sole purpose of shorting puts and calls to rubes.
Obama surely didn’t get where he is today on the basis of ability. That’s the premise of an August 2011 essay that I received yesterday via e-mail from a friend. It seems implausible that a piece so devastatingly critical of Obama would have appeared in the Washington Post, but the details ring true and so I am running it regardless of its source. Click here for the complete article.
When Deceptions End, So Will Europe’s Experiment
by Rick Ackerman on November 17, 2011 3:56 am GMT · 26 comments
Although U.S. stocks eventually did the right thing, plummeting to end the day, they were down only slightly for most of the session – a surreal performance, considering the hellish new tack of Europe’s financial crisis. If investors were already jittery about bailout-mania on the Continent, Wall Street bankers should be incontinent with fear over the rise in interest rates that has started to spread outside the high-contagion PIIGs zone. Even ostensibly top-tier borrowers like Holland, Finland and Austria have been getting socked with higher borrowing costs lately as investors have dumped triple-A paper issued by those countries. As for the deadbeats, Italy’s bonds pushed above 7% while yields on Spanish debt surged as high as 6.358%. Imagine a country trying to grow its way out of debt when it’s paying those kinds of rates on a Matterhorn of existing debts. The allegedly good news is that the technocrats who have replaced top elected leaders in Greece and Italy will come up with a plan to save the day. Yeah, sure. You can bet that Ben Bernanke’s got one they can try. » Read the full article