June 2010

A fairly important Hidden Pivot resistance at 20.170 remains our minimum upside target for the moment, but an 18.795 midpoint resistance will need to be overcome first. Sunday night price action was too choppy for an easy entry, but an impulsive thrust peaking between the two labeled highs could set up an excellent camouflage buying opportunity.

The futures look finally to be leaving the 1214.90 midpoint resistance behind, presaging a run-up to as high as 1261.80 over the next 3-5 days.  More immediately, they are tracking a minor bullish pattern that points with some clarity to 1236.20.  If it's breached by more than $1 or so, we should infer that a test of mid-May's 1251.40 high is imminent. Night owls can try buying on a pullback to 1220.00, the midpoint associated with the 1236.20 target, but I'd suggest using camouflage if available to limit the entry risk to four ticks or less. ______ UPDATE:  The futures dipped as low as 1218.20 overnight, so any attempt to buy down near 1220.00 with an ultratight stop-loss would have been stopped out for a small loss. 

As of around 9:45 p.m. EDT, the futures were predicting the Dow would hold above 10000 in the face of moderate selling. The minimum downside target is 10024, but if that Hidden Pivot support should be violated by more than 5-7 points, it could open the floodgates over the near term down to as low as 9599.  The accompanying chart shows the provenance of the 10024 target -- a bearish pattern identical to the one being traced out at this moment by the E-Mini S&Ps.

The futures were falling Monday night as trading resumed following the long holiday weekend.  The E-Mini S&Ps have been as low 1081.25, down ten points, but that is still somewhat shy of a minor Hidden Pivot support at 1076.00 that we'll use as a minimum downside objective for now. Night owls can try bottom-fishing using a 1076.25 bid and a three-tick stop-loss, but it's probably not worth much more than that, since traders could be in a surly mood due to the mostly unsettling news over the weekend. _______ UPDATE:  We were stopped out for small change when the futures came down to 1069.00 overnight.  Schizophrenic behavior colored the remainder of the day, with a rally in the first hour to 1094.50, then a 20-point selloff into the close that left the futures down around 15 points on the day.

Quite the hottie, isn’t she?  That’s “Rita Wilson” pictured below, and we didn’t think twice about adding her as a Facebook friend when she sent us a request a while back. We figured we’d find out later who she was, but we were wrong. She doesn’t answer e-mail queries, and Googling the name brings up only the actress Rita Wilson who is married to Tom Hanks.  This Rita Wilson’s Facebook biography says she lives in San Francisco. Because we lived there ourselves for more than 20 years, we thought that maybe there was a connection through some mutual friend or acquaintance.  Alas, as far as we’ve been able to determine, Rita Wilson doesn’t exist in the flesh.  Rather, she appears to have been concocted by some PR firm tasked with hyping the shares of publicly traded companies. This wasn’t so obvious to us at first, since Rita’s long list of Facebook friends comprises actual people from all over the world – people with eclectic interests and quirky things to say.  There’s Claire Louise Hay, for one, who wonders why her fish have been going haywire:  “Why [do] my barb fish have such a life-defeating reaction to stress? When startled, they leap out of the water, usually hitting the lid, but sometimes hitting the kitchen surface or the floor. It’s a wonder they’re not extinct.”  This is not the kind of stuff you can make up, even if Rita Wilson is. Rita’s Corporate ‘Likes’ As the weeks went by, however, the ever-expanding list of “Likes and Interests” linked from Rita’s Facebook page began to look more and more like the client list of a public relations firm. Many of the companies are based in China, mainly in energy and resource-related businesses, but there are also some American firms, including Dreamworks and