Selloff

The panic we’ve all been waiting for hit like a tsunami yesterday, sending the Dow Industrials into a thousand-point dive, 700 of it occurring in under ten minutes. We’d warned of this just a few days ago when we wrote that the market was “vulnerable to a sudden, even spectacular, selloff.”   Yesterday’s selling was indeed so ferocious that it might have gone on for another thousand points if not for Mr. Market’s addiction to round numbers.  With the Dow down almost exactly a thousand points, the broad averages turned from their lows like a cattle stampede encountering a wall of fire. We should consider it a warm-up for the real panic that surely lies ahead.  Thursday’s hysteria will be just a sound bite by the time it is replayed on the evening news, but when a truly destructive panic finally hits, it will run its course on Main Street as well as Wall Street. Safeway shelves will be stripped bare as quickly as stocks were stripped of value yesterday afternoon, and branch banks will run out of dollars before even a half-dozen customers have had a chance to deplete their accounts. In this scenario, it’s hard to imagine that things would return to hunky-dory the next day. Grocery stores would find it impossible to keep certain crucial items, such as toilet paper and batteries, in stock. The same goes for the banks, which hold but one crucial item in inventory. But what of the stock market?  Although the Dow had recouped 650 points of yesterday’s losses by day’s end, even the chirpiest news anchor would not deign to suggest that this warrants a sigh of relief.  Anyone who watched the stock market come unraveled on a monitor yesterday could only have been infected with a sense of foreboding. Under the

Silver quotes have come back down to earth with a thud, so perhaps it’s time to review our outlook, which was, and still is, quite bullish for both the intermediate and long-term. The Comex July contract has shed a hefty 10 percent of its value since Tuesday, settling at 17.51 yesterday after peaking just two days earlier at 18.89. Although this has caused some gnashing of teeth and sporadic expressions of anguish in the Rick’s Picks chat room, long-term bullion players who frequent the room seem to be taking the move in stride. We ourselves sounded an especially bullish note a week ago when we wrote that it would be a “piece of cake” for Comex silver futures to push above some daunting reservoirs of supply on the intraday charts.  The June contract duly obliged shortly thereafter, but as you can see in the May futures chart below, the rally left one key high at 18.91 recorded in January undisturbed. Although climactic buying missed exceeding that peak by just 2.5 cents, it was enough to make any selloff that followed a possible threat to the short-term picture. That threat was “actualized,” as they say, by this week’s steep selloff, but it remains to be seen how much more damage will be done. So far, it is minimal, and we therefore still expect the futures to hit a very bullish 21.53 by mid-June. That is our target for the July contract, and it was mentioned in last week’s commentary along with a secondary target at 20.21. At what point would our outlook turn intermediate-to-long-term bearish? That would take a print below 13.89 (!), since, according to the rules of our proprietary Hidden Pivot trading system, that’s what is required to turn the weekly chart bearish.  With respect to the daily chart,