The best way to see what Rick's Picks has to offer is to examine what we've said in the past. Below are links to archived comments that will give you the flavor of our commentary.
May 12 2008
Unless your were trading oil futures on Friday, the markets might have seemed pretty dull. A barrel priced for June delivery hit a new record high of 126.27, and we shudder to think what that might mean at the pump. So, what has been driving crude’s spectacular rise? Until a few weeks ago, there was a simple answer to that question: the... » Read more
May 09 2008
Unless your were trading oil futures on Friday, the markets might have seemed pretty dull. A barrel priced for June delivery hit a new record high of 126.27, and we shudder to think what that might mean at the pump. So, what has been driving crude’s spectacular rise? Until a few weeks ago, there was a simple answer to that question: the... » Read more
May 09 2008
Here’s more bad news for parents of teenage boys: Grand Theft Auto is here to stay. In its first week, the latest version of the adult-themed video game racked up $500 million in sales, beating the phenomenally successful popular Halo3 by a country mile. For comparison, the top grossing film of all time, Titanic,... » Read more
May 08 2008
Yesterday’s 206-point drop in the Dow was the worst decline in a month, according to a headline that caught our eye. But look at the chart below, which shows the Mini-Dow futures. From ledge to pavement, the dive produced barely a splat, failing to take out even a single prior low of significance. We’ve labeled a few such lows just so you know what it would have taken to merely hint of trouble... » Read more
May 07 2008
With the price of a barrel of crude currently wafting north of $120, Wall Street seems oddly, if not to say blithely, unconcerned. How else to explain a 50-point rally in the Dow on a day when oil prices roared to new all-time highs, violently reversing last week’s brief shakeout? Oil futures closed yesterday above $120 for the first time,... » Read more
May 06 2008
The statistical mirage of an economy on-the-mend continues to grow, this time with a pseudo-statistic from the Institute for Supply Management. The ISM reported yesterday that its non-manufacturing index for April rose to 52.0, from 49.6 in March. The usual
bunch of dartboard-trained... » Read more
May 05 2008
Ah, would that it were true! Yes, we did come within two ticks of nailing Friday’s spike high with a forecast made several weeks ago. And some Rick’s Picks subscribers evidently did get short at the exact top, reaping a windfall gain from the 21-point selloff that followed. But it doesn’t look like the coming week will afford bears much time to gloat.... » Read more
May 02 2008
My good friend Jonathan Wagner was laid to rest in Lafayette, California, yesterday after a brain hemorrhage ended his life at age 53. Many came to pay their respects, for Jonathan had quite a knack for making friends. Following is my... » Read more
May 01 2008
The lunatics were out in full force yesterday when the alleged “news” hit concerning the Fed’s latest 25-basis-point cut. The Dow’s initial reaction was to rally 90 points, to a fleeting top at 13010. But second thoughts came on like a ton of bricks, causing a nearly 200-point selloff in the next 50 minutes.... » Read more
April 30 2008
The weight of Gold’s weakness should be apparent to anyone pondering the chart below, since even a novice can see how relentlessly gravity has been tugging on the metal’s price. But what are we “experts” supposed to think? From a Hidden Pivot perspective, one more sharp tug could damage bullion’s prospects for at least the next few weeks. Specifically, if the June contract were to slip beneath the... » Read more
April 29 2008
We’ve been bullish on the stock market in recent weeks, but not very. It’s hard to get worked up when you’re convinced, as we are, that the rally may be setting up stocks for a crash from even higher heights. At the moment, however, Hidden Pivot analysis points at least somewhat higher, implying there is a strong but perhaps brief rally ahead that could bring the broad averages to an important top.... » Read more
April 26 2008
We can’t recall the last time we even looked at a trendline, but our friend Peter Eliades mentioned the one below in his latest update, and we just had to see it for ourselves. As it happens, the bullish... » Read more
April 25 2008
Citigroup’s shares have rallied 45% since bottoming five weeks ago. That might sound impressive, but the chart below puts it in proper perspective. As you can see, the stock has quite ways to go before long-term investors might be feeling anything close to a sense of relief. Citi lost two-thirds of its value relative to the highs of last summer, but it... » Read more
April 24 2008
Is it just our imagination, or have the stock market and the election campaign been tracking pretty closely lately? One day, we read that Obama has clinched the nomination; the next, that his name is mud in Pennsylvania. He’s Mr. Clean in a Newsweek feature story, then he gets tarred-and-feathered four days later by the Chicago Tribune for his alleged... » Read more
April 23 2008
The Dow fell a mere hundred points yesterday – an amazing show of strength, considering the disturbing tenor of the news. For starters, it was reported that existing-home sales for March fell by 2%, pushing the median price down to $200,700, or 7.7% less than a year ago. On the energy front, the price of a barrel of crude set another record, closing at... » Read more
April 22 2008
Bank of America got off easy yesterday after posting a 77% drop in earnings. The stock fell just $1.06, suggesting that investors may have gotten used to big banks routinely announcing multibillion losses every quarter. In B of A’s case, the... » Read more
April 21 2008
The week ended on a felicitous note, since we’d shorted some S&P mini-futures Friday on the exact high of the day, 1398.25. The advice that went out to subscribers the night before, with the S&Ps trading 26 points lower, was as follows: “If there's a... » Read more
April 18 2008
Sometimes we hear on the evening news that the stock market finished up or down only slightly on days when the averages have swung wildly all day. Yesterday was not one of those days. The Dow finished up a mere 1.22 points, and that pretty much tells the story. Most of the vehicles that we trade made their respective highs or lows early in the session, and from that point on, the biggest challenge... » Read more
April 17 2008
There must be quite a few more nervous shorts out there than we’d imagined. The Dow Industrials shot up 257 points yesterday, but take a look at the news that drove shares ebulliently higher: Intel earnings for the first quarter were off by 12%, and JP Morgan’s profits suffered a whopping 50% decline. For good measure, Morgan also noted that the credit... » Read more
April 16 2008
Looks like Apple has blown its cover as a “nice” company. An upstart named Psystar tried to sell Mac knock-offs for $399, but Steve Jobs & Co. lost no time coming after them with a meat-axe. Psystar returned to the market hours later with a slightly revised business model and a sales pitch even more coy than the first, but we’d need 10-to-1 odds to... » Read more
April 15 2008
Guns, Guts and God made America great! is a bumper sticker that wouldn’t raise eyebrows in Western Pennsylvania, but let a politician suggest that those are sentiments held most fervently by life’s losers, and all hell breaks lose. On the stump in San Francisco last week, Obama said workers in... » Read more
April 14 2008
We’ve dissed the news media at every opportunity because they failed so miserably to report on the problems that have caused the economy to implode. Newspapers like The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times should have known better all along, but instead they served up the kind of drivel that reads... » Read more
April 11 2008
Considering how steeply the dollar has fall in recent months, we might have expected more of a bounce when the selling finally let up. Instead, since mid-March, we’ve gotten a rebound so feeble that, on the daily chart (see below), the Dollar Index has yet to exceed even a single peak recorded on the way down. To put this weakness in perspective, and based on our Hidden Pivot rules, it would take an... » Read more
April 10 2008
Gold continued to claw its way higher yesterday, making steady progress since April 1 against punitive losses that had occurred, effectively, in mere hours. Look at the chart below and you’ll see the nasty downdraft that took bullion from an all-time high near $1036 in mid-March to a recent low of $876. That’s a 15% decline, and most of it could be accounted for by just a relative handful of price... » Read more
April 09 2008
We spent about 20 hours over the last few days trying to resolve a few “minor” computer glitches whose persistence could serve to explain why Microsoft is doomed. Go ahead and argue if you like. Our PC-savvy friend Cyrus says the firm’s hold on the O/S market is so entrenched that the company doesn’t have to even remotely care what customers think of the product. He says the Microsoft could sell the... » Read more