Friday’s rally was more of a waft than a squeeze. All of the would-be sellers evidently high-tailed it to Greenwich, Nutley and Fort Lee after lunch, leaving bulls and shorts – chickens and foxes in this context – to mind the coop on Wall Street. I quit at lunchtime myself, having missed the day’s one opportunity in the S&Ps as they slipped their tether just before 2 p.m. Eastern. The day was redeemed – we hope – by some opportune weakness in Sirius Satellite Radio. We did a little bargain hunting in the stock, adding to a small existing position after SIRI impaled a longstanding hidden-pivot support at 5.47.

There was some confusion around mid-morning, when I put out a “buy” bulletin keying off a promising, still-lower hidden-pivot support at 5.10. A subscriber quickly responded with a message informing me that Sirius had already trampolined off 5.10 and had already rebounded to above 5.30. This was seemingly corroborated by my TradeStation daily chart, but not by the hourly, which said the stock had traded no lower than 5.26. A call to TradeStation elicited a correction – one that had the stock indeed going no lower than 5.26. We opted to let our 5.12 bid for 400 shares ride, but when the stock bounced from 5.13 and started to move higher, we grabbed some at 5.19.

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Mencken would be long a ton of Howard Stern... 

We’ll likely find out next week whether it was a bargain at that price -- or merely just more Sirius-in-our-face.  If the latter and the stock drops to the next pivot, 5.04, it will be tempting to augment our bullish position yet again. And what would be the “ultimate bargain,” should we continue to average down? Jot this number down: 4.13, a major hidden pivot that is as fine a back-up-the-truck number as we’ve seen in quite a while in SIRI. Meanwhile, with a focus on Sirius we’re less apt to get in trouble obsessing over myriad possible ways to short Beazer Homes. The stock, by the way, appears ready to devour shorts all the way up to 184.85. That’s a hidden pivot 11 points above Friday’s close -- one good pole vault away for this stock. At any rate, buying Sirius seems more karmically correct, since, as the spectacular career of Sirius’ #1 booster, Howard Stern, would attest, no one ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public.  The author of that quote, H.L. Mencken, undoubtedly would be buying Sirius hand-over-fist were he around today.