With yesterday’s wilding spree, Tesla Motors joined a growing group of mania-driven stocks whose price has arguably gotten years ahead of reality.  Johnson & Johnson, Best Buy, Yahoo, Netflix — and, for a while at least, Facebook – are other hysteria outbreaks that we’ve tracked here recently, trading them from both the long and the short side. In the case of TSLA, permabears though we be, we were confident about going along for the ride until yesterday, when the stock, powered by a fury of desperate short-covering, kissed a 104.44 rally target. That number, a “Hidden Pivot” resistance, had been disseminated to subscribers when the stock was trading near $73 several weeks ago. At the time, we recommended getting long ahead of a possible blowoff, then to reverse the position and go short when the target was reached.

Early yesterday morning, the strategy appeared to be working perfectly. Tesla shares topped on a $7 gap to 104.63, just 19 cents from our target. Moreover, within the next hour those who had bought put options on the opening had an opportunity to cover some of them profitably when the stock retraced $3 of the rally. Via an intraday update, we further advised subscribers to tie their remaining puts to a stop-loss that would kick them out of the trade with at least a small profit no matter what happened next. This precaution saved the day when TSLA resumed its ballistic trajectory after stalling for a few hours. The stock went on to hit 110.75.

Ask Them Yourself

For those not acquainted with Rick’s Picks trading tactics, they are fined-tuned so that even permabears who hate the market can enjoy playing both sides of it. The Hidden Pivot rally targets frequently work with such precision that it’s possible to lay out speculative shorts without getting damaged when the market resumes its upward course (an all-but-inevitable outcome to which we long ago resigned ourselves). If you want to verify this claim, we invite you to visit the chat room and ask subscribers yourself.  Click here for a free seven-day trial that will allow you to sample all of the site’s features, including the 24/7 chat room, intraday updates and alerts, and daily trading “touts,” many of which are for beginners.

For our part, we’ll continue to try and pick the top in Tesla – as well as in the broad averages and numerous other high-flyers that have reputations for being bear-killers. We do this simply because it’s so much fun to try, and because we stand a reasonable chance of profiting even when we are wrong. Our next rally target for TSLA, by the way, is 126.55.  However, if the stock stalls at that Hidden Pivot, then subsequently blows past it, we’d be looking for…174.90.  We’ll concede that Tesla makes a great car – an exciting one, even.  But the company’s survival, let alone the spectacular success predicted by its current share price, is far from assured.