Wall Street shrugged off losses at GM, Honeywell and Intel to focus on the good news -- a $1.00 drop in the price of crude. The Dow Industrials were up nearly 129 points at the close, having rallied from a moderate deficit in the opening hour. If the ratio between blue chip stocks and oil quotes holds, a decline in spot crude to $51 might be expected to propel the Dow to new all-time highs. Of course, that’s assuming corporate America’s bottom line doesn’t deteriorate any further – and that significantly lower energy prices will not have come about because of recession.

Crude oil inventories rose by 5.6 million barrels last week -- more than  twice the 2.3 million barrels that had been expected -- and gasoline reserves were up as well, even though a decline had been anticipated. Motorists were already seeing some relief at the pumps, with prices in the Denver area down around 2.75 for a gallon of regular. The start of a major downtrend?  I have my doubts, but we’ll be able to make a more confident judgment if and when December crude falls to a hidden-pivot target I’ve flagged for subscribers. If the pivot is breached by more than 6-7 cents, my guess is that quotes are on their way down to the low $50s. Alternatively, a strong bounce from my number would portend a rally to new all-time highs.

No matter what happens, it’s likely that stocks will remain difficult to trade. Yesterday I recommended bidding somewhat below the market in the index futures, but my downside targets were never reached. This left us sitting on our thumbs for the remainder of the session. Clearly, Mr. Market is not yielding easy profits to such trading strategies as can be formulated and sent out the night before. It’s become a full-time job to find winners intraday, but that’s a service Rick’s Picks was never geared to provide. However, there’s good news coming for those of you who would like to have my signals traded mechanically each day. Through a retail broker, I am about to launch an equity-and-options service that would facilitate this. A similar service is planned for futures traders, pending my establishing a strong real-time track record with the broker, a Chicago firm. Expect a more detailed announcement about this next week.