Tuesday, May 14, 2013

One must drop down to the 30-minute chart or lower before yesterday's rally begins to look even a little bit interesting. Even then, the move is not bullishly impulsive, since it failed to exceed any true external peaks. That would require a print today above 1449.60, an 'eternal' high recorded May 10 on the way down. I'd set a snooze alarm there, since any less would be mere noise.  A pullback from a tick or two above it would be tradable, but be alert to the possibility that the 'x' trigger could come up very quickly.

The dollar's latest rally is bullishly impulsive on the daily chart -- sufficiently so, perhaps, to re-energize the bull cycle begun in February from around 79. The  thrust from last Wednesday's low is also quite enticing from a camouflage perspective, since it failed to take out early April's "marquee" high at 83.49 after getting past the required 'internal' and 'external' peaks.  Although we don't trade this vehicle, we monitor it to buttress trades in other currencies. Under the circumstances, a buy signal at x would provide reason to short other currencies, and to brace for possible weakness in bullion. _______ UPDATE (May 15, 3:19 a.m. EDT): The rally tripped an entry signal at 83.38 off a pattern similar to the one shown. The target is 84.26, subject to midpoint resistance at 83.79. _______ UPDATE (May 17, 4:32 a.m. EDT): The most recent thrust brought this vehicle to within 11 cents of the 84.26 target noted above. This has given way to a consolidation and new bullish pattern that projects to 84.56 over the near term, provided the 84.01 midpoint can be surmounted. (See inset, a fresh chart.)________ UPDATE (May 29): A new rally target at 84.95 has emerged that's based on the pattern shown (a fresh chart, inset). _______ UPDATE (June 5): If bulls are to get traction, we should see this correction turn from very near the 82.03 Hidden Pivot midpoint shown in this new chart.

Tesla got short-squeezed to within 28 cents of the 86.72 target I'd proffered early Monday morning, but a second-wind rally to 88.00 suggests it's got eyes for 104.44, the 'D' target associated with the first number. It can serve as a minimum upside objective for now, implying that all trades between here and there be positioned from the long side.  We'll plan on buying weekly puts if and when the target is reached, provided it happens before Wednesday of the given week.  Please note as well that a lesser Hidden Pivot at 94.19 (see inset) has the potential to stop the rally cold and can therefore be used for spec camouflage shorts. _______ UPDATE (May 28): Two weeks later, the 104.44 target remains viable.  If you're looking for a reason, it has been estimated that each automobile sold by Tesla has gotten a boost from subsidies of about $45,000.  Much of it comes from the tens of millions of dollars Tesla has received for selling zero-pollution credits to other car manufacturers.  This source of income, which alone accounts for the quarterly 'profit' Tesla just reported, will dry up after 2013, when other car manufacturers start delivering their own versions of the non-polluting car. _______ UPDATE (11:18 a.m. EDT):  The criminal lunatics who have pushed this rally opened the stock on a $7 short-squeeze gap to 104.63, just 19 cents from our longstanding target.  If you were able to get short there on my say-so (the stock has already had a $3 pullback), please let me know in the chat room so that I can establish a tracking position for your further guidance.  You should have taken a partial profit in any case, and now be using a stop-loss that will give you a small gain on the trade no matter

I spent three hours online Friday with the Geek Squad’s best and brightest, attempting without success to fix two seemingly minor problems in Microsoft Outlook. The first is that Outlook has been forgetting the password every time it checks my e-mail server. This problem has been intermittent over the more than ten years I’ve used Outlook, a nettlesome glitch that has survived all versions, updates and security patches. Although there are thousands of web pages that purport to deal with the issue, and presumably tens of millions of PC users who have sought to resolve it, I’ve yet to find a fix. Although Outlook on a bad day duns users with endless “Remember this password?” prompts, it would be easier to teach an Irish Setter to remember the date of your wedding anniversary. Particularly maddening is that the prompts continue to pop up every three seconds, even when one keeps instructing Outlook to “Remember this password”. My other Outlook  problem is that a feature designed to test the e-mail account settings has stopped working. Activate a test and it simply locks up Outlook so that the program becomes unusable. The only way to get past this bug – until the next time -- is to reboot the computer. At the end of Friday’s tech-support marathon, Chris, a Geek Squad expert with a five-star rating, offered the same, useless suggestion that tech support personnel have been offering PC users for decades: reinstall Windows.  They do this, of course, knowing full well that it takes someone who knows his way around computers the better part of a weekend to do a complete reinstall, and the user another two or three weeks to re-install all of the third-party applications that get wiped out in the process. A Thousand Layers of Buggy Code I