If you’ve been wondering when gold’s correction will end, there may not be much longer to wait. There are three hidden pivots not far beneath the 630.70 low registered yesterday by the Comex August contract, the most bearish of them just a whisker under $600. I’ve provided exact numbers in my Touts for Friday so that you can attempt bottom-fishing at any or all of them with extremely tight stop-losses. I’ve also ranked them in order of appeal. This should allow you to tighten stops even further, or to advantageously time the purchase of shares in any of the dozens of mining stocks that Rick’s Picks tracks and analyzes. Meanwhile, we’ve added a couple hundred shares of Miramar Mining (MNG) at what turned out to be yesterday’s exact low, 3.43. The purchase established a real-time tracking position for a subscriber who had queried me about MNG during Wednesday’s online Q&A session.

(Click on chart to enlarge)

Hidden pivots also proved useful in gauging the strength of yesterday’s rally, which together with the previous day’s move recouped almost the entire 184 points of Tuesday’s decline. I’d noted in my overnight comments for Thursday that if the Mini-S&Ps got past a hidden-pivot resistance they were butting against at 1274.00, they would continue up to at least 1292.50. The actual high yesterday fell about five points shy of that pivot, but there was little doubt that, unless the world ended overnight , the futures would reach it early Friday. They’ll need to do slightly better, though, achieving a minimum 1296.75, to set the stage for a running of the bulls next week. For your information, a target for the Dow Industrials analogous to the 1292.50 pivot in the Mini-S&Ps lies at exactly 11323.19. A rally to this number, at least, became an odds-on bet after the Indoos popped through 11207.17, a minor hidden pivot that I’d flagged before yesterday’s opening.

From a practical standpoint, I am looking forward to a broad rally because it will fatten the opportunity we’ve been seeking to short eBay, Citigroup et al. Any rally at this point begs to be shorted, of course, but not in a way that we can get hurt, even if we are dead wrong. As much could be said for bottom-fishing in gold, whose extremely bullish prospects seem almost beyond skepticism, notwithstanding the nastiness of this correction.

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Oz Seminar a ‘Go”

The hidden pivot seminar in Sydney, Australia is a definite, since no fewer than fifteen of you have told me you’ll be there. New York is first, though, in early October, and it will be a no-frills version of the course that I gave in Denver. After that there will probably be just one more session offered – in San Francisco, late in 2006 or early 2007 -- but that would be the last for a long while. If you would like to attend any of these sessions, please let me know asap via e-mail.  The course includes post-grad mentoring in a chat room forum.