Friday, March 15, 2013

The stock market reportedly is on its hottest winning streak since 1996.  Just for the fun of it, I've introduced a DJIA target not far above that has the potential to cool Wall Street fever.  Check out today's tout for details, including an alternative target 400 points higher if my 'magic number' should give way easily.

The 14572.39 target shown is one that I like, for reasons that seasoned Pivoteers will appreciate. Mainly, it's the clarity of the ABC price points amidst a hot mess of steroid-addled, psychotic upwardliness.  When I say that I 'like' the target, I mean to imply that it has the potential to stop this rally in its tracks.  This would be no small feat, since the stock market's surreal ten-day winning streak reportedly hasn't been equaled since 1996.  Keep in mind that our target is not chopped liver, as I am fond of saying, and so if it is easily breached we should infer that bulls are preparing to rampage next week, pushing the rally into an even steeper parabola. Were that to occur, my minimum upside objective would shift upward to 14981.16.  In any case, subscribers are encouraged to improvise tightly stopped (i.e, 2-3 points) shorts from 14572.39. _______ UPDATE (March 18, 1:14 a.m. EST): Friday's 14539 finishing stroke missed our rally target by 32 points, a wider margin than I might have expected. The implications are neither bullish nor bearish as yet, but the outlook would shift toward menacing if the hourly chart goes impulsively bearish without 14572 having been hit. That would imply a print below 14411, a prospect that seems quite possible if DaBoyz are not able to bring stocks back from Sunday night's Cyprus sell-off before the opening bell.  The significance of 14411 is shown in the new chart. _______ UPDATE (12:20 p.m.): This morning's low hit 14404, but the short-squeeze recovery has been so ferocious as to sneer at any bearish interpretation.  Even so, the selloff that follows this rally will hold the key to our immediate outlook. Keep in mind that if that selloff were to occur from a new all-time high, it would

I'll provide tracking guidance for 400 shares acquired yesterday @ 16.46, since the buy signal proffered in the chat room matched crystal-clear instructions I'd touted as well.  My expectations for this trade are not high, since GDXJ appears to be struggling too hard to maintain loft after Wednesday's promising impulsive thrust. For today, use a fixed stop-loss at 16.20.  The chart shows the significance of this number, a diminutive but important 'external' low. _______ UPDATE (March 18, 1:23 a.m. EDT): Exit a round lot on the opening and use an impulse-leg stop based on the hourly chart for the rest.  As of Monday morning, it would require an unpaused fall touching 16.56 to stop out the position. ______ UPDATE (1:25 p.m.): We exited 100 shares on the opening for 17.10, giving us an adjusted cost basis of 16.25 for the 300 shares that remain. For now, tie them to a stop-loss at 16.25, a single tick beneath the key low of 3/14. (Note: I am not acknowledging the Frankenbar print at 15.51 that Tradestation recorded on Monday's opening, since it couldn't have been real. We still hold a 300-share position with a 16.25 stop.) _______ UPDATE (April 1, 11:10 a.m. EDT): On a so-far intraday low of 16.24 this morning, the position has been stopped out for no gain or loss.  One of these years, possibly in our time, bullion will be a buy-and-hold bet.  But not now.

With few tradable opportunities to engage us, even on the lesser charts, we spent most of this hour scrutinizing daily and weekly charts to get a better idea of how certain geopolitical events might play out. You might find my conclusions about the U.S. Dollar and long-term Treasurys particularly interesting, so check ‘em out.

Price-rigging and deceptive advertising are so prevalent among broadband carriers that getting a good deal can pose quite a challenge -- not only for the unschooled customer, but for the kind of shoppers who read Consumer Reports each month from cover to cover.  I know this because I recently compared carrier deals when my monthly Comcast bill threatened to hit $300. This exorbitant sum is in addition to the $400 I pay Verizon for family wireless service, and another $400 for real-time stock-market data. My Comcast package includes nothing fancy – just two phone lines, 30mb speeds and a modest package of TV shows, movies and HBO.  I’m not a big TV-watcher, to put it mildly, and if I could pay what the service is actually worth to me, I’d send them a check every month for $14.95. Try explaining that to the kids.  For another hundred bucks, you get 800 channels, but after you’ve gone through the movie inventory once, you’ll be in a re-run hell so repetitious that even The Godfather, Parts I and II start to seem stale. My goal of cutting the $290 bill in half seemed do-able because Comcast itself was promoting a $90 package geared to home-based businesses.  The salesman I spoke with said that with a modest downgrade of my TV fare, the new package would cost me around $140.  Great, I thought.   How wrong I was. For starters, I was about to commit the capital crime of eliminating channels that my wife watches. Even worse, after I’d done so, she learned about it when she switched on the TV and got a test pattern.  I argued that I was saving nearly $160 a month, but her expert witnesses worked up a set of numbers that proved, with taxes and fees included, I’d