In choosing which few stocks to serve up as  ‘bellwethers’, I’ve elevated Amazon above all because of the company’s immense brick-and-mortar presence in the U.S. and abroad. Warehouses, delivery fleets and nearly 600,000 employees add up to a very large global operation, one that mirrors America’s economy across the entire spectrum of retail consumption. Facebook, on the other hand, exists almost entirely in the cloud, with just 25,000 employees and revenues derived chiefly from advertising. But what advertising!  Zuckerberg & Co. collect the kind of consumer data on two billion users that Madison Avenue firms could only have dreamt about in their 1980s heyday. Even Google and Amazon are limited to information that is merely ‘inferrable’, meaning they can roughly guess our likes and dislikes by looking at our history of searches and purchases. But on Facebook, we express those likes and dislikes explicitly, allowing the company to know us very personally, and to be targeted with microprecision by Facebook’s advertisers.

Unlimited Growth Opportunities

The foregoing explains why we should accord the same bellwether status to Facebook’s shares as we do to Amazon’s. Both are companies with unlimited opportunities for growth and visionary leadership. Investors see this very clearly and have bid up the stocks’ respective prices to extremely rich multiples. Looking at FB’s chart, it strongly implies an impending, $36 rally to at least 230.79, a major Hidden Pivot resistance. Given the way buyers recently shredded their way past the 189.91 midpoint pivot, I’d rate the stock an odds-on bet to reach the target, implying a move of nearly 20% from these levels.  If so, it should give pause to bears who think the bull market begun in 2009 is about to end. This is most unlikely as long as FB still has a substantial rally ahead of it that could play out until early autumn. If the Dow were to perform just half as well over the same period, it will be selling for around 27,000.