For more than a decade the bull market has flouted trendlines, Hindenburg Omens, Hidden Pivot resistances, cycles, channel tops and other ostensible rally killers, so there’s little reason to think it will not soon overcome the double whammy of some new impediments it encountered on Friday (see inset). We recently discussed the imposing DJIA trendline shown in the chart because it precisely capped three rallies earlier in the year; on Friday it came within a few points of nailing the high of yet another. What I hadn’t noticed before is an additional resistance, a 28,738 Hidden Pivot target that fell within a tenth of a percent of Friday’s high.

Long experience has taught us that bulls are likely to be frolicking above this seemingly crucial technical threshold soon, presumably bound for Dow 30,000. Even so, there are reasons to doubt they will do so before 2019 ends, and that even if they should push the Indoos to new record highs early in 2020, they are unlikely to blithely ignore the unsettling problems of two corporate giants, Boeing and FedEx. Rather than get worked up about the possibility of a major top, we’ll simply adopt a cautious, if not to say mildly bearish, trading bias for the remainder of the year. In practice this will entail monitoring minor, downtrending abc patterns for signs of waxing strength. If they should start exceeding their ‘d’ targets, that would mean the dominant trend — a.k.a. the bull market — is weakening or worse. ______ UPDATE (Dec 30, 5:15 p.m.): A good start!  Bears were understandably skittish about going on the attack for a rare change, but they did manage to push the Dow down by 183 points. Interest in the markets is next to nil at the moment, especially in the chat room, so I won’t go out on a limb with any sensational predictions.