Rick Ackerman

Apple shares have shifted into hyperdrive, pulling the broad averages and the FAANGs right along. (See my AAPL tout below for a technical rundown.) If the rally achieves its current target at 190.33, that would represent a move of about 5% from these levels. It would also raise the odds that Facebook, Amazon, Netflix and some other world-beaters will achieve their respective targets. This is quite a rally, consider the glum mood on Wall Street just a few weeks ago. Bear rallies are engineered to make us forget what was troubling the market just before stocks took off.  Is this rally just a deceptive, dangerous tease? What can it hurt to assume we're being set up, at least for the time being?

Buyers blew past a 'midpoint Hidden Pivot' near 179 Tuesday, leaving no doubt about their ability to push the stock to at least 190.33 in the days ahead (or 192.99 if any higher). It seems like only yesterday that AAPL was mucking around as analysts wrung their hands over sluggish iPhone sales in Asia. These days, however, a CEO need only say the company plans to do better and the shares rocket 20% in a couple of weeks, propelled by short-covering, hubris and some cheerleading from the usual places. We're not sure whether the Cupertino giant has regained its spot as the most valuable publicly traded company in the world, but the steep pitch of the rally is most surely having its effect on the broad averages and the FAANGs in particular. They seem not only inured to bad news, but are rising exuberantly on earnings expectations that would have seemed far too optimistic just a few weeks ago. It is all hype, of course, but there's no gain in fighting the tape. Traders please note that a pullback to 173.90 from current levels, however unlikely, would trigger a 'mechanical' buy signal.

Buyers showed bold tenacity Monday, holding the broad averages steady until an extremely volatile Boeing righted itself. The stock, cherished above all others by its institutional sponsors, came under heavy pressure overnight on news that a 737 had gone down in Ethiopia, killing all 157 aboard. This was the second fatal crash of this aircraft in five months, and it triggered a stampede out of Boeing shares that carried into the early minutes of the regular session. The selloff knocked the Dow for a loop, since Boeing, its most heavily weighted component, opened down 57 points. This helped put the Indoos 240 points in the hole from the get-go, in stark contrast to S&Ps that were up the equivalent of 150 Dow points. By day's end this divergence had settled heavily in bulls' favor: the Dow finished up 200 points; Boeing recovered 34 of the 57-points it had initially lost; and the S&Ps gained an impressive 40 points. "Tech" Stocks The Wall Street Journal pitched in with some ray-rah twaddle on the front page: Tech Stocks Bolster Global Markets. You could almost overlook that this is simply a narrowing of market leadership to an extreme, and that the geniuses who get paid to throw Other People's Money at stocks are merely piling into fewer than a dozen high-profile, huge-cap issues.  And not to sound churlish, but 'tech stocks' ain't what they used to be. There was a time when this group might have included companies hard at work building things, producing energy from fusion, canceling gravity -- that sort of thing. Instead, today's list of tech-sector giants is led mainly by glorified advertising agencies and companies that sell stuff on the Internet: Facebook, Google, Tencent Holdings, Amazon, Alibaba and Naspers (a media biggie that is Africa's largest publicly traded company).

It's Sunday night, and DaBoyz have so far  passed up a golden opportunity to shake down one of their favorite stocks, Boeing.  It's trading slightly above Friday's closing price, and this is most suspicious, since a Boeing 737 Max has gone down in Ethiopia, killing 157. That's the second disaster in five months for this aircraft, and one might think it would raise concerns with investors. My hunch is that the stock will fall hard on Monday, and that its slight buoyancy at the moment is just a deftly engineered con-job made possible by the almost total absence of volume. The E-Mini S&Ps are off fractionally, demonstrating once again that the timid felons who 'guide' overnight trading are content to do nothing unless there's some headline to make moving the markets riskless, or very nearly so.

The U.S. dollar has been slow to challenge the 97.87 peak from last June (see inset), even if its buoyancy has gone more or less according to our forecast. Our long-term outlook for the greenback remains very bullish -- so bullish, in fact, that we see the uptrend culminating in a short squeeze that wrecks the global financial system and reduces most commerce to a state of barter.  The initial phase of this scenario would feature a rally in the Dollar Index that tests and then breaches highs near 120 recorded nearly two decades ago. Well before then, however, every profligate dollar-borrower on earth -- you know who you are -- would be crushed by the burden of having to pay off debts in a super-hard currency. The list of potential losers stretches on and would include, for one, virtually all of the players in a derivatives markets currently valued at more than a quadrillion dollars. You should view every dime of this as 'unactualized' deflation in order to understand why the puny central central banks are powerless to prevent it. Not that they would even try. For, any attempt by the banksters to monetize this black hole of debt when it begins to implode would be tantamount to hyperinflating. And that would be worse than doing nothing at all.  When the crisis hits, perhaps with a few banks failing to open some Monday morning, it will be impossible to roll short-term loans. This will force debtors to settle up in cash, creating a desperate need for dollars. The resulting short squeeze is why deflation rather than hyperinflation is the more likely of the two scenarios to produce a financial day of reckoning. Bicycling to Soup Kitchens In a debt deflation those who owe would be liquidated into bankruptcy, pushing

Facebook's rally has the same thing going for it as Tesla's -- i.e., the stock is so easy to hate that everyone wants to be short it. Zuckerberg has figured out a way to exploit this. He showed street smarts by planting a 'bullish' story about the company's supposed new business model at the top of The Wall Street Journal's front page last week. My thoughts about this cynical distraction can be found here. Recall that Facebook and its founder were getting clobbered by bad press related to its sleazy and dishonest handling of privacy issues.  Now, with the help of a sympathetic and gullible press, he's muffled the clamor for his head. At the same time, Zuckerberg has convinced at least some investors that the company can make more money with small-group messaging, payment services and such than it currently does through advertising revenues. Not incidentally, Facebook's new 'story' will give Wall Street's shameless shills, the analysts, cover when they start hawking the stock again. From a technical standpoint, FB appears bound for the 188.48 target shown, predicated on a decisive move past p=174.04. Last week's peak occurred a hair shy of this benchmark, a fact that affirms both the pattern and its target. If the stock were to rally into our 'sweet spot' and then pull back to the green line, you should be prepared to buy there with a mechanical bid. Stay tuned to the chat room for timely guidance on this. ______ UPDATE (Mar 14, 7:51 p.m. EDT): Sellers knocked the stock down hard on news of an internet outage and the departure of a key executive. Although the recent top was just pennies from where we'd expected (see above), the selloff is a fake -- a shakedown that will allow DaBoyz to accumulate more shares

It will be most useful for the time being to step back from the hourly chart and consider the implications of a further, moderate fall in the June ES to 2699.31. That would trip an enticing 'counterintuitive' short and put p=2572.88 in play as a minimum downside objective. The foregoing is all theoretical at this point, but my gut feeling is that it is what we are about to see.  The trade's initial risk of $6300 per contract argues for another approach, but we'll consider the opportunity if and when it arises. For now, however, the yellow flag is out and your trading bias should be bearish. _______ UPDATE (Mar 11, 3:43 p.m.): The futures have gone sharply the 'wrong' way, tripping a counterintuitive buy signal at 2749 that projects to 2819. Consider the target a lock-up if a secondary Hidden Pivot at 2796 doesn't stop buyers. _______ UPDATE (Mar 13, 8:40 p.m.): Short-covering drove the futures seven points past the 2819 target provided above. This has put the 2866.25 Hidden Pivot resistance shown here in play as a minimum upside projection for the near term.

Friday's gratuitous swoon did not significantly change the perception that AAPL is headed for the 189.88 target shown in the chart (click on inset). In fact, if the pullback had come from our sweet spot between p and p2 (respectively, the red and pink lines), I'd have suggested a mechanical bid at 173.79 on Thursday.  As things stand, although the initial pullback may have discouraged some bulls, my hunch is that it simply shook them out. If so, the stock's next upthrust will not have their profit-taking urge impeding its progress. A close above the green line would undo whatever misgivings we might have about boarding the bullish bandwagon. For now, though, we'll simply wait and watch. _______ UPDATE (Mar 11, 9.40 p.m.): Today's powerful, gap-up rally stalled three cents from the 179.15 midpoint resistance shown in the chart (click on inset), confirming the pattern and its 189.88 target. As always, a decisive move through p will make the target an odds-on bet to be reached. Here's a new chart that shows it all.

The stock has been screwing the pooch for more than two months, tempting me to de-list it from the home page. Instead, I'll put out an 1842.24 rally target for now and let it steep for a while. It is shown in the chart (click on inset). The pullback to the green line did not meet our criteria for a mechanical buy, and so I did not advise it. A breach of C=1566.76 would negate the target but not necessarily the enduring, bullish look of the hourly chart. _______ UPDATE (Mar 24, 11:32 p.m. ET): After rallying more than 200 points, the stock has turned down hard just 18 points from the 1842.24 target. It remains viable, but we'll put it aside for now in order to focus on the downtrend. A pullback to p=1704.50, stop 1658.58, would be worth considering for an old-style 'mechanical' long, but I am not explicitly recommending it due to the approximately $18,000 initial risk on four round lots. _______ UPDATE (Mar 26, 11:13 a.m.): The rally has launched anew off a 1747 low that got nowhere near our 'mechanical buy' threshold. The 1842.24 seems so certain to be reached that we should be extra cautious about treating this like a done deal. ______ UPDATE (Mar 27, 10:13 p.m.): The 1842.24 target has further receded with the weakness of the last two days. Let's forget about it for now, since whether or not the stock gets there won't much change our lives.