Got That Sand In My Shoes, by Rick Ackerman

October 10th, 2006 Price: Subscribe »

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Got That Sand
In My Shoes

For edition of January 03, 2006

Warm greetings to you all in the New Year. I spent the holiday with friends in Colorado ski country, but as the photos below will attest, I’ve still got some sand in my shoes. The pictures were taken recently by two childhood buddies. One sails year-round, the other blogs to help keep the Army Corp of Engineers from doing for South Jersey’s shoreline what it did for New Orleans’ shoreline. The Corps would be thrilled to build a jetty on every beach if you let them, and the constant threat of having a someone else’s jetty capture all of the sand that might otherwise have replenished your own beach has turned my friend into a local crusader.

A few miles north of the scenes captured in these photos, on the same island, sits Atlantic City, a town that probably could have benefited from a few more jetties. Piled to a height of 200 feet, a Corps-built mountain or two might have smothered the casino business in its infancy, allowing the erstwhile Queen of Resorts to retain some of its former charm. Alas, the casinos not only destroyed the town physically, they replaced AC’s brazenly corrupt political leadership with a slate of colorless bureaucrats. Thus did the tradition of Atlantic City’s ex-mayors and supes finishing out their terms in orange jumpsuits pass into history. Who even remembers guys like Carlos LaSane, William Somers, Mike Matthews and Arthur Ponzio? The prosecutor who put them in jail, Herb Stern, went on to bigger things, and the hoods who paid them under the table were rubbed out by a more ruthless breed of wise guy.

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Bullish Din 'Deafening'

Following is an interesting observation from our friend Peter Eliades at Stockmarket Cycles:

Happy New Year to all our subscribers! As the year 2005 was beginning, we told our subscribers that 2005 stood a chance of being the first down year ending in the digit 5 since the inception of the Dow Jones industrial average in 1897. Although that prediction turned out to be accurate, it was somewhat of a Pyrrhic victory. The Dow was down 0.6% for the year, far from a significant decline and the S&P 500 was actually up for the year. We believe 2005 will go down in history as an amazing year of bullish sentiment. Despite the fact the Dow was down for the year, we have now seen three consecutive calendar years without one weekly plurality of bears over bulls for the first time since the inception of the Investors Intelligence (30 Church St., PO Box 2046, New Rochelle, NY 10801) sentiment survey initiated over 40 years ago. What makes the three years of consecutive weekly pluralities of bulls over bears all the more remarkable is that since December 31st, 2003, the Dow is up only 2.5%. Bullish sentiment in the face of a declining or even sideways market tends to be quite bearish for the market. As an almost perfect exclamation point for this amazing run of bullish sentiment, the market year ended with more than 60% of investment advisers bullish, one of the highest bullish percentages of the year.

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Hidden-Pivot Seminar

Over the years, many subscribers have written to ask where they could go to learn about hidden-pivots. I’m pleased to announced that I will be conducting a 1-1/2-day seminar in Denver, probably in late February. This will likely be a one-time deal, since I have no interest in getting into the trading-school business. A limited number of seats will be available on a first-come, first-served basis, with priority going to Rick’s Picks subscribers.

I haven’t settled on a date yet, but the course most likely will be held on the final weekend in February or the first weekend in March. Whatever the case, this will be an event to which you will want to bring your spouse. It will be held at the new J.W. Marriott in Denver’s ritziest commercial district. The hotel sits across the street from Cherry Creek Mall and is surrounded by great restaurants, art galleries, jewelry stores and boutiques.

This is not going to be a “how-to-get-rich” course, as most subscribers will already know, but rather an opportunity to learn in a relatively short time all of the proprietary tricks that I use to forecast hidden-pivot swing points with two decimal accuracy for all trading vehicles, in all time frames.

Here are some of the things that 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 play bullish or bearish hunches while risking only pocket change or, just as frequently, 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 the 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 famous 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, single-night lodgings, airport shuttle, a 100% money-back guarantee, and all meals except dinners. I will require a $200 deposit by no later than mid-January, but for now I’m interested mainly in determining how many people would attend. Class size will be limited to sixteen or less. If you’re serious about coming, please let me know soon as possible by clicking here. Also, please indicate your first-, second- and third-choice dates between mid February and late March.