Rick Ackerman

The U.S. dollar has been one of the few big market winners lately, but this is hardly a good thing. If the greenback continues to strengthen, it will hurt U.S. multinationals whose overseas revenues are reckoned in currencies that would be falling. In addition, all who owe will need to repay their loans in dollars more dear than when they were borrowed.  And it will sink prices for a broad variety of commodities, particular crude oil, that have been used to collateralize a super-leveraged derivatives market worth perhaps $1.5 quadrillion notional. Do you see the problem? Throughout its 25-year history, Rick's Picks and its predecessor, Black Box Forecasts, have never wavered in their bullish outlook for the dollar. In recent years, our projection for the Dollar Index (DXY), currently trading around 101, has called for a test of highs near 120 recorded in 2002. When DXY slid to 71 between 2002-08, we saw this as merely corrective. What a Fool Believes Our outlook for the dollar is congruent with the deflationary bust we foresee puncturing the outsize asset bubble created by the central banks over the last 40 years. Residential real estate is a big piece of it, and you can imagine for yourself whether mortgage lenders will ultimately allow homeowners to pay off their loans with a few hundred-thousand-dollar bills peeled from their overstuffed billfolds. This is just one of many reasons why a hyperinflation is not coming. Set against them is the entrenched belief that the Fed would never let deflation happen. Well, on Tuesday, the dollar, along with the real burden of debt, soared despite the fact that President Trump was offering up a trillion dollar stimulus package in an attempt to offset economic damage from the pandemic. Ordinarily we would have expected the dollar to reel

We shouldn’t be intimidated by algos and their vaunted trading machines. Most of the developers are math majors whose rules-based systems often fail to anticipate the occasional craziness of human behavior. Our trades will generally fall between the algorithmic cracks, and the evidence of this is that they continue to work. But only because our own rules continue to evolve. This lesson focuses on examples of how we get our edge.

[Note: This commentary now strikes me as having been w-a-a-a-y too bullish. Some important things have changed since I published it. For one, the $1 trillion+ stimulus package is already a transparent failure -- not just psychologically, but of political leadership. Does anyone -- other than eggheads and some politicians -- actually think it will stimulate anything? Absolutely not. And there is this: Spring-break revelers have introduced grave uncertainties that will persist for at least another four to six weeks, until we can be sure they have not jump-started a contagion that the nation has paid an extremely high price to suppress. The stock market cannot possibly sustain a rally under the weight of such anxieties. RA] If you're feeling depressed because your retirement fund has been cut in half by the Covid-19 avalanche on Wall Street, take heart because you may have a good chance to get it back. Yeah, I know, I wrote here only last week that the bear market would stretch on for years, bankrupting us all and ushering in the Second Great Depression. But watching the spectacular collapse of Boeing shares has made me more of an optimist. The stock has plummeted from $350 to $129 in a little more than a month, wiping out more than $150 billion of capitalization. It is the swiftness of Boeing's fall that I find most encouraging, since this could have happened only if the stock's canny institutional sponsors wanted it to happen. Why on earth would they? Simply because they are quite confident they eventually will recoup their investments -- and perhaps even a little something more for their pain and trouble. Throwing the Switch And I don't mean to imply that it will take years or even months for them to get back to flush. More like

With the scent of disaster hanging over the world's markets this morning, the dollar is down. But not by much, and I doubt it will stay down for long. Following is my post in the trading room, a response to a note from 'Marko' that Franco-Nevada founder Pierre Lassonde is bearish on the dollar. I am not -- and haven't been for 40 years. Here's why: "What reason did Lassonde give for this? I ask because I doubt that he could provide a satisfactory one. The dollar is down somewhat at the moment -- against exactly what I cannot figure out -- but this is probably because the world hears Trump and the Fed promising to supply more or less infinite dollars to "shore up The System." Can they do this? I have argued for more than three decades that they could not, but I guess we will just have to wait and see. Banks Hold Little Cash Neither Lassonde nor any other bankster I am aware of seems to have thought this through. I have, though, having noticed how difficult it was to withdraw just $25,000 in cash money from a Wells Fargo branch when all hell was NOT breaking loose.  I have also asserted -- dozens of times -- that a severe shock to the financial system could unravel the clearing network that allows credit cards and ATMs to work. Did Lassonde mentions this little, ahem, problem? Has he or any of his colleagues ever even thought about it? Of course not. Is it nonetheless possible? Yes, inarguably. And is it possible to keep the global financial system, most particularly the intricate gearwork of the vast repo market, liquid when it is imploding? I seriously doubt it, but I am willing to suspend disbelief for the moment. But

It feels odd to be characterizing Friday's 2000-point rally in the Dow Industrials as "just noise," but that's what it was. It's a safe bet that almost none of the buying was driven by optimism about how pandemic news would play out over the weekend. Who could predict such a thing? Uncertainty reins, and the only thing that seems certain at this point is that the normal flow of life and business in the U.S. and around the world will face more disruptions than anyone could have imagined even a week ago. We look to the news media to make sense of it all, but those who write about such world-shaking events as have occurred recently often seem as confused as the rest of us. On Friday afternoon, for instance, when the Dow Average closed with its biggest gain ever, most of it achieved in less than an hour, the Wall Street Journal headlined its digital front page with this unintentionally wacky mash-up:  Stocks Soar as Trump Declares National Emergency. Linking these two events sounds preposterous, doesn't it? The editors must have thought so too, since the headline was quickly changed to: Stocks Rise Sharply as Haywire Week Wraps Up. A Fatal Disease Haywire would be an understatement, for it was the craziest, most volatile week in stock-market history. That's because machines are doing nearly all of the trading these days, and the algorithms that instruct them are programmed to detect and exploit the stock market's every cough, sneeze, hiccup or belch before any living thing feels even a slight tremor. It was bad enough when short-covering humans with hair-trigger reflexes could cause stocks to soar for little or no reason. But when ten thousand thinking machines are set against each other to accomplish the same thing, except profitably, the

Hey, don't shoot me, I'm only the messenger, but the biggest one-day rally in history failed by a significant margin to reach its D target. That would be 2720.50, as the chart shows, but buyers sputtered out nearly 50 points shy of this Hidden Pivot resistance. It was worse than that, actually, since the A-B leg of the pattern shown wasn't even impulsive, strictly speaking, since its point 'B' high failed to surpass any 'external' peaks. Can you smell fake?  In any event, I'm not going to suggest getting in the way of the upthrust, fake or not. We'll just have to wait and see what Sunday night/Monday morning brings before we place any bets. If you are following this vehicle's charts yourself, don't be intimidated by the size of the swings.  The way they play out and their predictability is exactly the same as if they were insignificant moves on a one-minute chart. That's how you should view them if you want to cut the moves down to tradeable size. ______ UPDATE (Mar 15, 11:35 p.m.): Regulatory circuit breakers have arrested the futures' hellish plunge Sunday night, but I don't see how the June contract, which settled Friday at 2684, can avoid plummeting all the way to 2204 (!) eventually, circuit breakers or not. That target would be an odds-on bet as far as I'm concerned if p=2450.75, the midpoint Hidden Pivot in this hourly chart gets schmeissed when stocks open Monday morning.  This would equate to an approximately 4600-point fall in the Dow Industrials, to 18,500. _____ UPDATE (Mar 18, 9:04 p.m.): Although the 2204 downside target remains quite viable, we'll need to respect today's short squeeze off the lows, since it generated a bullish impulse leg on the hourly chart.

I've revised downward to 0.26% my forecast for interest rates on the Ten-Year Note.  A 0.30% target given here earlier was based on an erroneously drawn pattern discovered by a subscriber. But could the so-far low at 0.39% have been the bottom, especially considering the power of the subsequent rally to 0.98%? It's possible, but I doubt it. The pattern itself is sufficiently clear and compelling to suggest that the Hidden Pivot target will not merely be closely approached, but actually touched. This revised forecast will have no bearing on my forecast for a drop to 0.73% on the 30-Year Treasury Bond. It  traded down to a record 0.84% last week but has since rebounded as high as 1.63%. The T-Bond sellers who drove rates back up to that height were useful idiots who were simply fulfilling the inviolable law that no trend ever goes sup or down in a straight line without correcting. ______ UPDATE (Mar 18, 9:15 p.m.): This is quite a rally we are witnessing -- probably the steepest climb ever recorded for yields on the Ten-Year Note. So, was the dip to 0.39% the finale for the long-term cycle? I doubt it, but I am not going to get in the way of this rally.

A spectacular two-day sell-off has negated the 1731 rally target we were using. Although this has not significantly altered the still-bullish look of the long-term charts, it has put gold in a deep hole that could be difficult to climb out of.  There is a 40% chance nevertheless that the futures have seen their lows for the time being, since Friday's bottom occurred at a 'double' Hidden Pivot support. The chart shows one of them, a secondary pivot at 1508.40; but another, unseen, is the D target of a slightly different pattern with a higher 'B-C' segment. If the so-far timid bounce continues and turns into a bona fide rally, it would need to surpass the 1610.00 peak recorded Thursday on the way down to become significant. ______ UPDATE (Mar 16, 8:45 a.m. EDT): Gold is getting whacked under heavy liquidation by investors whose idea of a safe haven, evidently, is any asset that can be hocked up the wazoo. This chart says the April contract, currently at 1461, will fall to at least 1407 groping for traction. _______ UPDATE (Mar 16, 8:32 p.m.): Bullion and mining shares have been so perverse lately that we should allow for the possibility of a powerful rally for no good reason. If it can surpass an 'external' peak at 1574.8 made Sunday on the way down, I'd infer that bulls are back in charge and capable of challenging last week's 1700.70 high. _______ UPDATE (Mar 17. 8:41 p.m.): I'm raising the bar to 1598.0 before I believe this rally might go somewhere. That's a tick above an 'external' peak recorded March 13 on the hourly chart, one peak above the one noted earlier at 1574.80. Failing that, the 1407 target given above will be back in play.

This stock was so revved up at the close on Friday that one could almost believe it capable of returning to the old highs. I seriously doubt it, although we shouldn't get too aggressively in the stock's way as it methodically disembowels any bears who survived Friday;s carnage. Remember, AAPL's institutional sponsors are the smartest, craftiest, richest scumbags in the investment world, and they instinctually work together as one when the goal is to replace themselves with new owners. For sure, Warren Buffett and his ilk are in for the long haul. But if they can create opportunities to lighten up at ridiculous prices, they will. From a technical standpoint, Friday's rabid short-squeeze must be respected because it began at a secondary pivot, p2=250.87. That is where corrective moves often end, although reversals occurring from p (in this case, 268.58) should be treated with even more respect. ______ UPDATE (Mar 16, 8:35 p.m.) The 233.16 target shown in the chart remains valid and can be used to bottom-fish, provided you know how to control the risk tightly. _______ UPDATE (Mar 17, 8:50 p.m.): Not sure what I found to like so much about the 233.16 target, since AAPL has bounced from within 21 cents of another  that comes from as juicy a pattern as I can now find. The stock has been struggling for three days to hold the low, but I won't offer any predictions at the moment concerning whether it will hold. Here's a graphic picture. _______ UPDATE (Mar 18, 9:21 p.m.): Buffett and DaBoyz beat back sellers for a third straight day, suggesting this could be the start of a short squeeze more murderous, even, than the $25 tsunami that occurred last Friday.