I’ll be away from the office for the next 12 days, enjoying summer’s end with friends at the Jersey Shore. The show will go on at Rick’s Picks nonetheless, albeit in a lower gear. The Morning Line essays will cease temporarily, as will daily emails to readers and investors. But timely commentaries and trading recommendations via Facebook and You Tube will still be on offer whenever warranted. I use the phrase ‘whenever warranted’ with trepidation, since it sometimes seems as though Mr. Market enjoys doing really crazy things whenever I am away from my desk for more than a few days. This could be partially attributable to seasonality, with winter rallies and summer dives tracking the phases of the moon. But consider yourself warned that the dog days of summer are over, and that the stock market’s animal spirits are undoubtedly ready to re-emerge, perhaps even before Labor Day.
Touts
$ESU19 – Sep E-Mini S&P (Last:2932.75)
Posted August 20, 2019, 7:06 pmRick’s Picks Member-only content. Please Login (in Right Column)You must have a current Rick’s Picks Subscription to view this page
$$TNX.X – 10-Year Note Rate (Last:1.57%)
Posted August 18, 2019, 8:54 pm
Are rates on the Ten-Year Note finally bottoming? Quite possibly, according to technical indicators that we monitor closely. T-Notes touched a low last week of 1.47% after plummeting almost relentlessly from 3.49% last November. GDP was running at around 3% back then, and almost no one other than a few hardcore deflationists, your editor among them, saw rates on the Ten-Year falling below 2%. Now, however, given the look of the charts, it would be wise to prepare for a possible rate rebound, even if it proves to be temporary.
By our runes, a bounce from these levels would be logical because last week’s low occurred almost precisely at a Hidden Pivot target first aired here some time ago. It was one of a series of lows forecast by Rick’s Picks in 2019. The chart shows how rates bounced last Thursday from within 0.02 points of the 1.47% target. The Hidden Pivot support whence the bounce occurred clearly worked, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it will hold indefinitely. In fact, given the clarity of the pattern associated with the support, if TNX were to decisively breach it in the next few days, that would strongly imply rates are headed significantly lower in the weeks and months ahead.
Belated Boldness
Meanwhile, some of Wall Street’s best and brightest, having missed the huge rally in Treasurys, which produced capital gains of 15% or more for the few who saw it coming, are now venturing boldly forth to proclaim it is over. Some Investors Are Betting the Flight to Bonds Is Overdone was how The Wall Street Journal headlined their belated change of heart. We’re inclined to bet with them for the time being, albeit with less bravado, shorting Treasurys and going long on yields. But to repeat: If TNX, which tracks rates on the Ten-Year, were to close below our 1.47% target for a couple of days or trade decisively below it intraday in the next week or so, we’d take our bet off the table, pronto._______ UPDATE (Aug 21, 10:26 p.m.): The bounce from the target yet to get legs, but it is clear that the Hidden Pivot support worked in precisely identifying a tradeable inflection point.is
$+GDX – Gold Miners ETF (Last:29.22)
Posted August 18, 2019, 5:12 pmRick’s Picks Member-only content. Please Login (in Right Column)You must have a current Rick’s Picks Subscription to view this page
$GCZ19 – December Gold (Last:1523.60)
Posted August 18, 2019, 5:09 pmRick’s Picks Member-only content. Please Login (in Right Column)You must have a current Rick’s Picks Subscription to view this page
DXY – NYBOT Dollar Index (Last:98.10)
Posted August 4, 2019, 5:03 pmRick’s Picks Member-only content. Please Login (in Right Column)You must have a current Rick’s Picks Subscription to view this page
NYA – New York Composite (Last:12,920)
Posted August 1, 2019, 6:14 pm
On July 9, we ran a chart from our friend Peter Eliades of Stockmarket Cycles that showed the New York Composite Index head-butting a trendline whose provenance traces back to the 2009 start of the bull market. With the selloff of the last two days, the trendline appears to have racked up yet another prescient call (see graph above). Three separate attempts in July to get past it failed, and the resulting top is looking more important with each new wave of selling. If you count the number of times the trendline “worked” since last August, there were no fewer than five instances where it provided support, and then five since October where it acted as resistance. This is quite impressive and would become even moreso if the weakness we’ve seen this week starts to snowball.
Put Options Doubled
Peter’s trendline resistance closely coincided with a Hidden Pivot target for the E-Mini S&Ps at 3028.75 noted here on July 23. The actual top occurred three ticks above it, at 3029.50, allowing subscribers and Facebook followers to get short in timely fashion using DIA puts. Numerous subscribers reported ‘doubling out’ on those puts in the Rick’s Picks Trading Room today. By closing out half of their options for twice what they paid, the half of the position that remains is effectively free and riskless. Closing out half of every ‘doubler’ is a strategy we recommend for virtually all option trades. If you don’t subscribe but would like to follow the discussion in the Trading Room (and in the breezier Coffee House), take a free two-week trial subscription by clicking here. No credit card is necessary.
Tuesday, August 20, 2019
The consistent accuracy of Rick Ackerman’s forecasts is well known in the trading world, where his Hidden Pivot Method has achieved cult status. Rick’s proprietary trading/forecasting system is easy to learn, probably because he majored in English, not rocket science. Just one simple but powerful trick -- managing the risk of an ongoing trade with stop-losses based on ‘impulse legs’ – can be grasped in three minutes and put to profitable use immediately. Quite a few of his students will tell you that using ‘impulsive stops’ has paid for the course many times over.
Another secret Rick will share with you, “camouflage trading,” takes more time to master, but once you get the hang of it trading will never be the same. The technique entails identifying ultra-low-risk trade set-ups on, say, the one-minute bar chart, and then initiating trades in places where competition tends to be thin.
Most important of all, Rick will teach you how to develop market instincts (aka “horse sense”) by observing the markets each day from the fixed vantage point that only a rigorously disciplined trading system can provide.
The three-hour Hidden Pivot Course is offered live each month. If it’s more convenient, you can take it in recorded form at your leisure, as many times as you like. The course fee includes “live” trading sessions (as opposed to hypothetical ‘chalk-talk’) every Wednesday morning, access to hundreds of recorded hours of tutorial sessions, and access to an online library that will help you achieve black-belt mastery of Hidden Pivot trading techniques.
The next webinar will be held on Tuesday, August 20. Click below to register or get more information.
