Friday, December 28, 2012

GCG13 – February Gold (Last:1662.60)

– Posted in: Current Touts Rick's Picks

Today's chart is intended to throw cold water on any spark of enthusiasm you may be harboring for gold right now.  As you can see, there's plenty of room for the futures to fall if they're going to test the lower trendline.  My guess is that this will occur, although I doubt the selling would go much further than that.  The additional good news is that a subsequent bounce within the pennant would require less energy for an upside breakout because the boundary lines will have narrowed.  Most immediately, however, the lesser charts are bullishly impulsive and project to 1674.10 if p=1667.70 can be exceeded on a closing basis. (The relevant pattern can be found on the 15m chart, where A=1653.10 at 9:45 a.m. EST on 12/27, and B=1666.10.)

ESH13 – March E-Mini S&P (Last:1410.75)

– Posted in: Current Touts Free Rick's Picks

I disseminated a 1378.50 downside target yesterday when the futures crushed the 1403.50 midpoint support of the pattern shown. It's yours to leverage as you please (see inset), but we shouldn't get too immersed in such relative trifles, since fiscal-cliff mania could be rampant at any moment of the day.  Such hysterics would of course be constrained, if not to say governed by, Hidden Pivot swing points, but merely knowing where those price points are does not necessarily guarantee us a safe-boarding pass and a comfortable berth.  Click here for information about the upcoming Hidden Pivot Webinar and a $50 discount.

Stocks Teeter as Rome Burns

– Posted in: Free Rick's Picks

Stocks stayed glued to fiscal-cliff headlines on Thursday, transfixed by the mounting horror of Capitol Hill's potentially catastrophic impasse. Midway through Wall Street's day, with Harry Reid wallowing in a well-publicized Marianas Trench of despair, the Dow was down only 120 points, raising the question of whether The Street's best and brightest comprehend the magnitude of the tax wallop slated for auto-enactment on January 1. We're probably already in recession, after all, and huge new taxes on top of a slew of economically asphyxiating Obamacare 'revenue-enhancers' would probably suffice to turn an incipient recession into a full-blown depression. The suspicion grows that Obama has been intent all along on wrecking the economy so that he could implement his own version of FDR's New Deal. If so, he's well on the way toward realizing that goal. Meanwhile, our esteemed representatives on Capitol Hill have scheduled a special session for December 30 to discuss...whatever.  Stocks rallied back to unchanged on the news, proving that DaBoyz are eager and willing to put Other People's Money on the line if there's sufficient "good" news to sustain the epic delusion that everything's going to work out just fine.

Try Tuning Out the Craziness

– Posted in: Commentary for the Week of March 8 Free

[Inflationary pressures are not exactly rampant right now, notwithstanding the huge increase in the cost of living imposed on us by Obamacare. For your interest, we present below some observations with a deflationist theme that were left in the Rick’s Picks forum yesterday by Cam Fitzgerald, an occasional guest commentator here. In our opinion, he gets the big picture  just about right. RA] There’s no doubt that deflationary pressures are still the overriding concern of most Western nations. That deflation itself is at our gate is hardly even debated anymore, as it is now widely acknowledged that the coming wave of baby boomer retirements will lower consumption , hold home values flat in real terms and push up Medicare costs for at least the next decade. Ongoing deleveraging and the prospect of rising savings rates and falling consumption could prove to be very damaging to economic performance while lowering growth and pushing us into recession. Jobs growth is still tepid, and it is difficult to imagine this improving substantially as public debt is finally dealt with at the policy level while taxes rise and program spending is cut. Others have asserted here that we will deflate first and have nasty inflation later. I agree. The worry is just how bad the inflation might be at the later stages, but my guess is that it will take years to play out.  We who watch the trends will have time to adjust if we pay attention to the signs and use our heads to avoid the shoals that lie ahead. We have been fortunate, though. The worst of our worries have not yet materialized. That is not to suggest that they are not lying latent, awaiting the right circumstances to spring on us in surprise. Instability abounds, and any broad shake-up on