I’d provided a strategy for Monday that would have temporarily flattened our short position in the S&Ps, but only if the futures had dipped slightly on the opening. Instead, they rose moderately, presumably because the dollar was up and crude down in Sunday overnight trading. Both obviously have been weighing on investors’ angst-ridden minds lately -- oil prices the moreso now that petrol prices are approaching the $2.50 threshold in certain regions of the country.

Not a month ago, with gas selling for around $1.80, I read a prediction that the price of a gallon of regular might get as high as $2.16 by this summer. The “experts” who forecast pump prices have compiled a track record so dismal that even the local weathermen seems oracular in comparison. They must be in cahoots with the EPA guys who calculate the sticker mileage that appears on the windows of all new cars. My Lexus SUV is rated at 28 on the highway, but the highway they’re talking about must have the slope of a ski trail. Actually, the EPA does all of its driving on a dynamometer, a fact that accounts for most of the difference between real-world mileage and EPA mileage.

But I digress. The important thing to consider when the stock market opens for business on Tuesday is that the bearish S&P targets that I gave yesterday are unchanged, Monday’s punk rally having failed to generate a new set of hidden-pivot coordinates.  Please note that the lower of the two targets, 1159.25 (basis the E-mini),  is just a tad beneath January’s bottom. You don’t need to be a hidden-pivot expert to recognize in the chart below just how important that support is.