Who needs a Plunge Protection Team when the Federal Reserve stands ready to ignite Wall Street’s New Year with a rip-roaring bonfire?  Never mind that the fuel for yesterday’s short-squeeze was a low-octane pile of manure, containing as it did little more than coy hints from the Fed’s December minutes that the central bank might stop tightening sooner rather than later.

News doesn’t get much softer than that, but it was obviously sufficient to send bears into a buying panic. As nearly always, it took short-covering by “don’t pass” bettors to drive stock indexes above key resistance levels. Bulls had shown themselves incapable of this task when they spent the entire month of December producing little more than irritable bowl syndrome on Wall Street. Yesterday, with crude oil prices in an explosive rally, it would have been asking too much of them to pitch in. So leave it to the pessimists to punch through daunting supply – and to the Fed to know precisely when to apply the necessary squeeze.

(Click on chart to enlarge)

Of course, the central bank’s New Year’s gambit did not require investors to become more bullish -- only for their pea-sized brains to become sensitized to the possibility that, in mere moments, a mob of CNBC-watching bozos on a hair trigger might get there first. Such was the dynamic of yesterday’s rally, which could not have impressed sober observers as much as it did the bull-marketing channel’s talking heads. We note that the surge did not surpass even a single one of December’s peaks (see chart above). Of course, that could change in an hour this morning. But if so, it will have to be be without the element of surprise that helped make yesterday’s running of the bulls seem so outwardly impressive.

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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.