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.
March 10 2008
We had staked out a short position in Citigroup on Thursday’s close, selling March 20 calls naked for almost two bucks apiece, but the stock, aided by short covering, swam against the tide on Friday and finished with a mere 17-cent loss. So much for Friday Follies. By tradition, the stock market is supposed to act a little crazier than usual on Fridays, but all we saw was the same old teeter-totter... » Read more
March 07 2008
The catch-phrase “subprime mess” is giving way to a new financial buzzword: “counterparty risk.” Although we’ve yet to hear Katie, Brian or Bob use the term on the evening news, it’s been surfacing with increasing frequency in print, and it got a real workout yesterday when it was needed to explain why two financial giants that had not even been rumored... » Read more
March 06 2008
Two of this year’s most powerful stock-market rallies have occurred on rumors that bond-insurer Ambac Financial Group was about to be bailed out. But isn’t it a little late to be talking about rescuing a company whose stock has shed 95 percent of its value since July? Ambac’s chart (below) suggests that it should be given a decent burial, not the... » Read more
March 04 2008
With gold stealing up on the $1,000 mark, it’s silver bulls who are just coming to the party. Better late than never, we say. Silver would be trading for around $54 an ounce right now if it were keeping pace with gold the way it did in the early 1980s. In fact, you can still buy all the pure silver you want for... » Read more
March 03 2008
With the economy going to hell in a hand basket, you might think it would be easy to make a bundle shorting the shares of some stock that’s getting there fast. We thought this ourselves about MGM Mirage, a savvy casino operator that has bet the ranch on boom times in Las Vegas – and not just boom times now, but more or less forever. But the... » Read more
February 29 2008
In testimony before Congress this week, Helicopter Ben finally acknowledged publicly what most of us have assumed all along – that the Fed will continue to ease no matter what. As an unstudied idea it sounds do-able, especially with the alleged “experts” who interpret Fed policy on the evening news still working so hard to persuade us that more easy credit is somehow going to reverse a debt... » Read more
February 27 2008
Can you see the sky from where you are sitting? If not, go outside and look directly above you. Are there any $100 bills wafting your way? We didn’t think so. So much for the theory that “Helicopter Ben” would shower America with printing press money if something ever went seriously wrong with the economy. And... » Read more
February 27 2008
The Dow has tacked on 400 points since Friday, but could there be even more silliness ahead? The chart below, posted to the chat room yesterday morning, says yes, quite possibly – as much as 500 points over the next couple of weeks. That would be pretty amazing, considering the economy is falling apart, joblessness is about to explode, home prices are dropping faster than at any time since the... » Read more
February 26 2008
Traders have a saying -- “Opportunity moves to size” -- and we may get to see it play out in the form of a dramatic showdown in the gold market if the IMF receives a go-ahead from the U.S. to sell 400 tonnes of bullion from its inventory. The prospect surfaced yesterday when it was revealed that the Treasury Department apparently has been lobbying... » Read more
February 25 2008
The most violent short-squeeze we’ve witnessed in more than a week transformed a despairing stock market on Friday into the proverbial lipsticked pig. But don’t expect the little oinker to fly... » Read more
February 22 2008
Is stagflation taking hold? In our dreams, maybe, since its impact would be relatively benign in comparison to the economically lethal debt deflation now spreading from financial assets and real estate into the consumer economy. The Wall Street Journal, among others,... » Read more
February 21 2008
Whenever bullion swoons $20 or more, as it did yesterday for the umpteenth time, we need to remind ourselves that it’s only a game, one who’s sole purpose is to keep gold bulls from making easy money on the most one-sided bet since Secratariat practically lapped the field in the ’73 Derby. Who on earth could possibly think gold is a sale here? (other than Kudlow, of course. Some may... » Read more
February 20 2008
What would it take to bring the price of oil down to $75 barrel? How about the completion of a bearish chart pattern such as the one imagined in the chart below? We can just hear Brian Williams on the evening news six months from now, introducing technical analysis to the masses: “The price of crude oil fell sharply again today, hitting $75 a barrel – the... » Read more
February 19 2008
U.S. markets were closed Monday, but global action in some of the E-Mini futures contracts suggests that a significant number of traders may have spent the holiday weekend sniffing glue. How else to explain the 17-point rally that seized the E-Mini S&P (see chart below) in off-hours trading Sunday night and early Monday morning? That’s equivalent to about 130 Dow points, and Tuesday’s opening... » Read more
February 15 2008
Keen to short the shares of Citigroup, as well as those of the casino operators and certain other publicly traded companies hurtling toward certain disaster, we’ve patiently awaited the powerful short-squeeze that would finish off recalcitrant bears who survived January’s 1,100-point Dow rally. But is it possible that all of the squeezing has already been done, and that the last breath of bearish... » Read more
February 14 2008
As if preparing for a spectacular suicide, stocks once again rampaged higher, blithely ignoring yet one more glaring sign that the financial system is falling apart. The Dow settled up 179 points on the day, seemingly oblivious to a distress flare fired into the sky by Citigroup. The beleaguered banking giant told the Associated Press that about $6... » Read more
February 13 2008
Warren Buffett played the White Knight on Wall Street yesterday, promising to single-handedly buttress debt markets by writing secondary insurance on up to $800 billion of municipal bonds. Someone pointed out that it is not the muni bond market that is in trouble, but rather structured financial products. However, this seemed a niggling concern to us, since it is all but inconceivable that at least... » Read more
February 12 2008
It was springtime on Wall Street yesterday as bulls evidently seized on the notion that an economic rebound is right around the corner. This nutty idea brought the shares of General Motors in particular to a froth. The stock rallied 6% in the space of six hours, settling back 50 cents to end the day at 27.08. That’s nearly 40 percent below the exuberant peak of $43 registered back in... » Read more
February 11 2008
Gold passed every strength test we could devise last week, ending on an upswing that hints of significantly more upside to come. From a purely technical standpoint, we like the fact that corrections have been routinely reversing at Fibonacci-based supports, and that most of the subsequent rebounds have easily surpassed at least two prior peaks on the hourly chart without pausing for breath. Such... » Read more
February 08 2008
Even Wal-Mart appears to be struggling these days. Same-store sales rose a meager 0.5 percent in January and 1.4% for the fiscal year. The latter number is the lowest since the company began reporting such data 30 years ago. Not only that, customers were drawing down their gift cards more slowly than in the past and using the cards increasingly to buy... » Read more
February 07 2008
Buyers yielded ground stubbornly for the second straight day, digging themselves a deepening trap from which extrication will become more difficult as the week draws to a close. The danger became manifest on Wednesday’s opening bar, which slightly exceeded a dramatic and important low made a week ago. From a Hidden Pivot perspective the overshoot was sufficient to create a bearish, 460-point impulse... » Read more
February 06 2008
What could possibly cause bullion quotes to fall apart here? Not much that I can see. Or even imagine. Someone in the Rick’s Picks chat room said yesterday that he was looking for a powerful rally in the dollar, which would of course be a negative for gold and silver. But the only reason he could cite was that... » Read more
February 05 2008
If Microsoft buys Yahoo! to try and muscle its way on-line, why should Google even care, let alone be worried about it? Reportedly, the search-engine firm has been maneuvering behind the scenes to thwart the deal, lobbying for antitrust scrutiny and chatting up Yahoo's CEO about some joint projects. But this simply doesn't add up for a company as... » Read more
February 04 2008
Word on Friday of the first U.S. payroll contraction in more than four years barely slowed the stock market’s bullish rampage. Despite the grim news, which makes fools of those who still profess to see no recession, the Dow Industrials rose nearly a hundred points. We’d expected as much, since this is no ordinary rally, but rather a dead-cat bounce driven almost entirely by maniacal short-covering.... » Read more
February 01 2008
Despite psychotically wild price swings that are becoming almost routine, the stock market continues to act docilely and more or less predictably when approaching our Hidden Pivot price-reversal points. Yesterday, for instance, in the early minutes of the session, we caught the exact low of a sensational 450-point reversal in the Dow Exchange Traded Fund (ETF) with this trading... » Read more
January 31 2008
Looks like it’s going to be McCain’s race to lose. Now, if only we can tune out the news media between now and next November, since the bilge they will be spewing at us ad nauseum could prove toxic if it continues to flow at the current rate. For now, the story that just won’t flush is that Mitt Romney, with his vast personal wealth, will be... » Read more
January 30 2008
For a stock market that was supposed to be merely marking time yesterday, the hundred-point gain achieved by the Dow was pretty impressive. We expect stocks to ease moderately this morning ahead of the latest credit loosening, and possibly to fall on the “news” itself, since there is almost no possibility of a bullish surprise. After all, what would it take to surprise anyone? A 100-basis-point cut... » Read more
January 29 2008
Could the phony short squeeze that began last week be mutating into a more or less “real,” albeit doomed, rally? It certainly seems like it. We had warned of this when we wrote as follows, referring to the S&P mini-futures: “Yesterday's deftly manipulated short-squeeze had ‘fraud’ written all over it, but that doesn't necessarily mean the rally can't mutate insidiously into the real thing if... » Read more
January 28 2008
The Dow head-faked its way to an undeserved hundred-point gain Friday morning, but it was all downhill after the opening bar. Our prayerful mantra, “Baby needs a new pair of shoes,” was trained on the shares of Citigroup, but the karma just wasn’t working. All it would have taken to get us massively short at... » Read more
January 25 2008
Details of the “stimulus package” led the evening news last night, providing Katie Couric with an opportunity to sound almost as dim-witted as those who are promoting this fiscal dirty bomb. What will it take before one of our network anchors lights upon the unspeakable truth – that the government’s apparent cure for debt deflation is to go another $150 billion into... » Read more
January 24 2008
Could that deafening smacking sound be the lips of a million traders waxing ecstatic over the prospect of shorting into this rally? Three words of advice: Be very careful. Like you, we would absolutely love to get short somewhere near these levels, since it... » Read more
January 23 2008
We’ve never doubted there’s a Plunge Protection Team lurking out there somewhere, ready to do battle with the gravity, but until yesterday we were skeptical The Team would try something so unsubtle as buying stocks hand-over-fist when a selling panic threatened. That’s the way most market-watchers seem to think the PPT operates, and their conspiracy theory is not without merit. One reason it seems... » Read more
January 22 2008
Gold at $10,000 an ounce? Gurus and hard-money advocates have been predicting it for decades, ever since currencies began to seriously decouple from bullion in the 1930s. I’ve been skeptical of such forecasts myself, mainly because my deflationist imagination has always envisioned a world in which... » Read more
January 18 2008
In the bond pits yesterday, there were murmurs and groans of outright despair. “The bond market has already priced in that nobody will ever be able to sell a house again in his lifetime," said Michael Davis, a CBOT trader. "It's not as if there's more bad news that we could factor in fundamentally,” he told a Wall Street Journal reporter. “It's just that the market is taking its cue entirely from... » Read more
January 17 2008
Today’s musings are those of my dear wife Marilyn – a nice change of pace, I hope, from the usual Rick rant. Here’s her very first guest editorial: ... » Read more
January 16 2008
We’ve always maintained that debt deflation would provide few opportunities to get rich and that, moreover, it is likely to challenge even financial geniuses to hold onto a fraction of their current net worth. Indeed, the housing collapse that is now sucking the U.S. economy into a deflationary black hole is not going to work like the dot-com boom... » Read more
January 15 2008
Here’s an unpopular point of view that surfaced yesterday in the Rick’s Picks chat room: “Gold is at the top of a parallel trend channel started from the rally off the 1999 low. The sentiment index is at 95% bulls. The handful of times where the sentiment index has pushed this high over the past decade have all resulted in a market correction, sometimes a... » Read more
January 14 2008
Here’s an unpopular point of view that surfaced yesterday in the Rick’s Picks chat room: “Gold is at the top of a parallel trend channel started from the rally off the 1999 low. The sentiment index is at 95% bulls. The handful of times where the sentiment index has pushed this high over the past decade have all resulted in a market correction, sometimes a... » Read more
January 14 2008
Look out below! The Fed chairman gave it his best shot on Thursday, lying through his teeth about the true state of the economy, but apparently no one believed him. We were surprised ourselves by the stock market’s dismal reaction, since we’d fully expected Wall Street’s Magicians of Manipulation to keep Thursday’s short-squeeze going for at least another... » Read more
January 11 2008
In the chart below, it’s plain to see that DaBoyz lacked the guts yesterday to promote an all-out short squeeze. The S&Ps may have rallied 40 points from their intraday lows, but look at how the top of the rally failed to take out any meaningful highs to the left of it. In Hidden Pivot terms, there is no bullish impulse leg here to get excited about, only little stuff that would be useful merely... » Read more
January 10 2008
When we warned of an imminent 320-point fall in the Dow Sunday night, we admonished subscribers not to share a related S&P target with their friends, lest the publicity “queer” the prediction. We needn’t have worried. Yesterday the S&P futures completed their multi-day plunge, falling to within a quarter of a point of our 1385.25 target; then they trampolined 30 points higher,... » Read more
January 09 2008
Now that’s more like it: Gold way up, stocks way down! Felt right as rain, didn’t it? And to make things even sweeter, we had both sides of the trade nailed, naked-shorting Diamond January 130 calls on Monday’s close (as announced in the Rick’s Picks chat... » Read more
January 08 2008
Call it a failure of the imagination, but we’re hard-pressed to believe that any sane investor would be buying shares these days. Sure, there are always going to be a few ultraviolet-sunny, Kudlowesque optimists capable of deluding themselves into believing that a real estate collapse, hundred-dollar oil, a recessionary surge in unemployment, rampant consumer inflation, terminally diseased bond... » Read more
January 07 2008
Here’s Hillary on the stump, with some egregious dissembling that we could not let pass unremarked: "Of all the people running for president, I've been the most vetted, the most investigated, and -- my goodness -- the most innocent, it turns out," she said to applause. My goodness, what a shameless liar! ... » Read more
January 04 2008
We flatly asserted here a while back that the madrassa-educated Obama didn’t have a prayer, but perhaps we shouldn’t have written him off so easily. For in fact, a prayer is what he does have – millions of them, it would seem, each emanating from the heart of some voter who passionately believes Obama... » Read more
January 03 2008
Three topics are provoking quite a bit of discussion these days among the pundits: 1) the odds of recession; 2) the supposed... » Read more
January 02 2008
Which stocks should we be watching most closely to gauge the health of the economy in the coming months? A year ago we’d have topped the list with Citigroup, which seemed destined to thrive as long as the Fed was in easing mode. However, a glance at the chart below shows that Citi shares have fallen steeply even as monetary policy has shifted once again... » Read more
January 02 2008
Which stocks should we be watching most closely to gauge the health of the economy in the coming months? A year ago we’d have topped the list with Citigroup, which seemed destined to thrive as long as the Fed was in easing mode. However, a glance at the chart below shows that Citi shares have fallen steeply even as monetary policy has shifted once again... » Read more
January 02 2008
Which stocks should we be watching most closely to gauge the health of the economy in the coming months? A year ago we’d have topped the list with Citigroup, which seemed destined to thrive as long as the Fed was in easing mode. However, a glance at the chart below shows that Citi shares have fallen steeply even as monetary policy has shifted once again... » Read more
December 31 2007
If we’d glimpsed 2007’s economic headlines in a crystal ball last December, we would never have imagined that the Dow Industrials would wind up the year within easy striking distance of record highs. The real estate market may be in deep distress and global financial markets profoundly unsettled, but most of us as individuals made it through unscathed. We can only be thankful for this... » Read more
December 28 2007
No sooner had we resigned ourselves to the vertigo-inducing logic of a “Santa Rally” than the stock market surprises by swan-diving from a three-meter height. Talking heads attributed the weakness, as well as the upward skew of bullion and gold quotes yesterday, to Benazir Bhutto’s assassination, but since when have the markets cared about what was going on in the real world, especially when the... » Read more
December 27 2007
Tiresome as yesterday’s price action may have seemed, it nonetheless generated robustly bullish signals for stocks and gold. Both vehicles marginally exceeded bullish price triggers that had been flagged in Wednesday’s Touts section. With respect to the Dow Industrials, we now expect a 500-point rally, presumably... » Read more
December 26 2007
Obligatory year-end mark-ups are bound to push stocks still higher into New Year’s Eve, but don’t expect the Dow to hit new record highs any time soon. That would require a 650-point thrust from these levels, and although a rally of that magnitude would require a trajectory less steep than the short-squeeze that added 700 points to the Industrial Average in the days immediately before and after... » Read more
December 24 2007
It’s snowing like crazy here in Boulder at the moment, promising the whitest Christmas the Front Range has seen in recent memory. For the last week or so the snow has been piling up where it was most desperately needed -- in the drought-parched southwestern corner of the state, near Telluride and Durango. I’ll be headed for the slopes myself shortly to... » Read more
December 21 2007
We spent the day thrashing around in expiring Research In Motion puts and calls, which turned lethal after the close. The stock had climbed steadily throughout the session, settling at 108 with a quite respectable gain of $6 on the day, But that was before news came out immediately after the bell that RIMM had beaten by three cents a supposedly over-the-top street estimate of 62 cents per share.... » Read more
December 20 2007
Saudi clerics have issued what amounts to a fatwa against the dollar, but their efforts might be better spent finding ways to invest surplus petrodollars so that the benefits are felt outside the royal palaces. Officially, the Wahabists called on the Saudi government to fight domestic inflation by decoupling the riyal from the dollar. “We remind you of Prophet Mohammad's words that you are shepherds... » Read more
December 19 2007
The hourly charts continue to hold the key these days to “phenomenally accurate forecasts.” For example, after predicting a 30-point drop in the E-mini S&P futures a few days earlier, we used the 60-minute chart to catch the low of yesterday’s trampoline bounce within a single tick (i.e., a quarter-point). Here is the recommendation exactly as it went out to... » Read more
December 18 2007
Inflationists have always maintained that the Fed would do whatever it takes to prevent the economy from slipping into deflation. How seemingly fortuitous, then, that someone deserving of the nickname “Helicopter Ben” was at the helm of the Federal Reserve when it came time to push monetary expansion to its theoretical limit. Recall that the idea behind a helicopter rescue of the financial system... » Read more
December 17 2007
Comex Gold has been dancing at the edge of a cliff, although it’s not possible to predict quite yet whether it’s going to fall. However, the outlook for bullion could conceivably turn very ugly quickly, since, if the February contract were to dive below 780.40 this week, it would generate a robustly bearish Hidden Pivot signal on the daily chart.... » Read more
December 14 2007
The stock market looked like hell yesterday, considering the announcement that retail sales for November were up 1.2% -- double the “estimate” of alleged economists. Another statistic out yesterday: Producer prices for finished goods jumped 3.2% -- well above the 1.7% estimated by, probably, the same bozos who grossly underestimated retail sales. (Where... » Read more
December 13 2007
Another wild day on Wall Street. Was this the way things felt in the months leading up to the Great Crash? Those were interesting times too – so much so that those who lived them must have sensed it self-consciously, just as we do of our own era. Back then, the U.S. was a relative oasis of political and economic stability. Europe enjoyed no such respite,... » Read more
December 12 2007
Whooooosh! A little disappointment brought stocks down in a huge hurry yesterday. Permabears shouldn’t get their hopes too high...er, low, though, since the nearly 300-point fall in the Dow didn’t violate a single important support on the daily chart. In fact, we’d be surprised if the mass mental illness that... » Read more
December 11 2007
Ahh, another Fed Day has arrived -- and just in time to stimulate a more joyous holiday shopping experience for all of us! Who can guess what kind of zany, utterly mindless reaction will greet the “news” today that virtually every tape-watcher in America has known for weeks was coming?... » Read more
December 10 2007
Years ago, a reporter friend of ours was gathering information for a book he planned to write about Donald Trump. It was during the 1990-91 recession, and even though Trump was still riding high, we told our friend to save the final chapter for a sensational bankruptcy. A few years earlier, SPY magazine had... » Read more
December 07 2007
A 200-point rally here, a 300-pointer there, and before you know it we’re going to be reading about how the Dow Industrial Average is once again at new record highs. We admit it, the prospect just kind of snuck up on us. Not that we would have been the first to notice, so busy were we weeding, watering and... » Read more
December 06 2007
One more thrust and the dollar will record its best rally of the year. We can’t tell you why the buck has strengthened, at least not yet, but our hunch is that it will prove to be just another correction in a bear market now almost six years old. In the meantime, the rally is having a commensurate impact on bullion, and on the price of crude, which has fallen below $90 after flirting with the $100... » Read more
December 05 2007
A guru is not going far out on a limb these days when he declares that the sky is falling. Real estate is in its worst funk since the Great Depression, and even the homebuilders are hard-pressed to say when things might turn around. The scare story of the week concerned a freeze on withdrawals from a Florida investment pool that manages cash accounts for state school districts and local governments.... » Read more
December 04 2007
We always expected the Fed to pull out all the stops when the U.S. economy began to slip into the void, but we never could have imagined the spinmeisters would invent “mortgage welfare” even before recession had been officially declared. Treasury’s latest plan is designed to make it easier for certain ARMs borrowers to temporarily freeze their starter rates to avoid foreclosure. We know the... » Read more
December 04 2007
We always expected the Fed to pull out all the stops when the U.S. economy began to slip into the void, but we never could have imagined the spinmeisters would invent “mortgage welfare” even before recession had been officially declared. Treasury’s latest plan is designed to make it easier for certain ARMs borrowers to temporarily freeze their starter rates to avoid foreclosure. We know the... » Read more
December 03 2007
The stock market’s sociopathic behavior seemed to ebb slightly on Friday, starting with a half-hearted short-squeeze rally that petered out mere minutes after the opening bell. DaBoyz goosed the Dow for 160 points in the early going, but... » Read more
November 30 2007
Yesterday’s forecasts showed no great prescience, since the short-squeeze that we’d expected to kick off the day was nowhere in evidence. Instead, the stock market opened soft and spent the rest of the day navel-gazing. What made the lack of follow-through especially surprising was that Asian stocks had risen sharply Wednesday night following the U.S. stock market’s... » Read more
November 29 2007
Given the stock market’s remarkable surge the last couple of days, anyone reading only the headlines might get the impression that all our economic troubles were behind us – the mortgage crisis, falling home prices, dark clouds of recession, the sickly dollar, etcetera. Alas, all of those problems are still... » Read more