The seashore town of Margate, New Jersey, where I grew up in the 1950s, didn’t produce many big-time celebrities. There were no professional baseball players, no Wimbledon aces, no famous authors and no movie stars. Okay, there was Seth Justman, who played keyboards for J. Geils Band. And Chris Ford, a standout hoopster at Holy Spirit High, carved out a distinguished career in the NBA, playing for the Detroit Pistons and then serving as head coach for the Boston Celtics. But that was about it, unless you count the Tisch brothers and Bob Tisch’s movie-producer son, Steve.

Considering how very dull Margate was, you can imagine my excitement when I first learned that my very-next-door neighbor, Jack Abramoff, had reached the pinnacle of criminal success on Capitol Hill. It seems that, as an uber-lobbyist and A-list influence peddler, Abramoff made more money than Al Capone merely by hooking up clients with Congressmen who could reliably deliver the goods.

Now, I’d love to be able to tell you a riveting anecdote about little Jack that illustrates how, even at the tender age of seven, we all knew he was headed for the big time – and the Big House. But the fact is, I don’t recall the kid at all. Was he the little drooler who would drop his drawers and muddy himself in our back yard? Or was he the other kid, the one who used to shoot rubber-tipped arrows onto the roof of our house. I don’t recall, and neither, probably, does anyone else who grew up in the neighborhood. Apparently, Jack and his family moved to Beverly Hills before any of them could make their mark on the downbeach communities.

But I do recall that Mrs. Abramoff was one tough cookie, at least in the eyes of the prepubescent brats who ruled the 300 block of Essex Avenue. You didn’t screw around with Janet Abramoff, although it’s possible her name was not Janet.  And her husband – Jack’s father – Whatzisface Abramoff. Sold golf courses for Arnold Palmer Enterprises. And drove a big car. Probably.

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Seminar Nearly Full

Readers have responded more enthusiastically than I’d anticipated to my announcement of a course on hidden pivots next month. As a result, I will be able to offer the course on two separate weekends -- February 25-26 and, probably, March 18-19. As of now, I have room for only four or five more students, so if you plan to attend please contact me as soon as possible by clicking here. The course will be given at  the J.W. Marriott in Denver’s ritziest commercial district. The hotel is the city’s newest and sits across the street from Cherry Creek Mall, surrounded by great restaurants, art galleries, jewelry stores and boutiques.

This is not going to be a “how-to-get-rich” course, but rather an opportunity for you to learn in a relatively short time all of the proprietary tricks that I use to forecast those amazingly accurate hidden-pivot swing points.

Here are some of the things you can expect to learn:

• How to set up for killer opportunities in the first hour, when most traders are on the sidelines “waiting for the dust to settle.”  
• How to initiate trades in mini-futures contracts using stops of a point or less.
• How to use cheap, way-out-of-the-money options to leverage bullish or bearish hunches while risking only pocket change or even nothing at all.
• The one trick that can overcome the edge the option floor traders have over retail customers. 
• How to use "dynamic trailing stops" to manage risk when a trade is in progress.
• The juiciest trade set-up I have discovered in nearly 30 years of trading. It is a nearly infallible pattern that takes two days and one night to ripen to perfection on a 15-minute bar chart.
• How to use five- and fifteen-minute charts to read much bigger trends with precision and absolute confidence.
• How to forecast price swings far more accurately, even, than some of the most celebrated gurus and sophisticated trading algorithms.
• How to overcome the 95%-plus failure rate of trading-school “grads”.     

The cost of the seminar will be $1,900, including course materials, post-seminar mentoring, a hidden-pivot calculator, four-star lodgings for two nights, airport shuttle, and all meals except dinners. Registration forms will be mailed out by mid-month and must be returned with a $200 deposit. The deposit will be refundable until the week of the course, and tuition is covered by a 100% money-back guarantee.