Although we used to feature edgy market commentaries in this space, the time and effort spent crafting them is now devoted to making the Rick’s Picks Trading Room an unbeatable source of timely, profitable ideas for novices and professionals. Your editor must confess that he had wearied of having to write regularly about a stock market energized by chimp-brained portfolio managers whose only “skill” is recklessly throwing Other People’s Money at some ginned-up theme-of-the-week. Truth to tell, having to take the stock market seriously every week wore me down. You know it and I know it: It’s just an epic con-job created to enable a bunch of thimble-riggers to make vast sums of money without having to do any actual work.
You should make a habit of checking here weekly, since I will continue to post links to my latest interviews (see below) and to offer visual enticements designed to entertain, enlighten and even warn you. Much of it will come from YouTube, since their video catalog is vast and endlessly fascinating. Submissions, including home videos, are welcome and should be sent to this address.
To view this week’s offering, click here for a fascinating account of how Casablanca was made: without a finished script, with stars who did not want to be in it, about a place the author had never visited. Bogart ad-libbed “Here’s looking at you, kid,” and the most-quoted line of all, “Round up the usual suspects,” came in an epiphany when the two screenwriters, the twin Epstein brothers, were sitting at a traffic light in L.A. As for the iconic standard As Time Goes By, the song would have been pulled from the movie if Ingrid Bergman had not gotten her hair cut short at the wrong time. This YouTube presentation is well researched and filled with facts that even hard-core film buffs may not have heard. It runs 27 minutes, with a few short commercials.
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The analytical “touts” listed below, overhauled each Sunday and updated 24/7 during the week, will continue as always, as will their barbed emphasis on the striking similarities between Wall Street and a carnival midway. The absurd accuracy of our trend calls and price targets is well known and a matter of daily record, but it must be observed up-close and leveraged with actual trades to be believed. On a particularly fruitful Friday not long ago, for instance, we recommended buying QQQ 720 put options that were trading for 1.67 if and when they came down 0.27. They did, bottoming at 0.25 an hour later before rocketing to $3.55 in under 30 minutes, and then to 5.05 shortly thereafter. Just four options purchased initially at the recommended price for a total of $108 could have been cashed out an hour later for more than $2000. And there was more. Separately, December Wheat took an insane leap precisely to a $7.83-per-bushel target that a day earlier we’d “guaranteed” would be reached.
You can get in on the action by clicking here for a free trial (no credit card necessary). It will give you instant access to one of the best chat rooms in the trading world and all other amenities of the site. Then click here for my most recent interview with Howe Street’s Jim Goddard on This Week in Money. We talk about why the coming bear market will be the catalyst for a deflationary bust worse than the 1930s Depression. Realize that millions of Americans literally lived off the land back then, with a third of the working population tied to agricultural. This time, the bust will lay bare a huge surplus of superfluous jobs that add nothing of value to the economy. Back in the day, the dollar was sound, real estate prices were not grotesquely inflated, primed for collapse, and Americans were not in debt up to their eyeballs. The implosion of Social Security and Medicare will create unthinkable problems, since there is no way Millennials and Gen X, Y and Z-ers will be able to foot the healthcare bills for Baby Boomers aging into their eighties and nineties. Bear markets are inevitable, and the one that is coming will expose the greedy delusions that underlie these boom times.