Rick Ackerman

AAPL waltzed past the 161.48 midpoint resistance shown with such ease on Tuesday that there should be little doubt about whether it will reach the 168.33 target. This is slightly higher than the one at 168.05 given here earlier, but the new one looks to be more accurate and reliable.  A pullback to the green line would trip a 'mechanical' buy signal, but so would one to the red line once it has been exceeded for a few bars by at least $1.00 or so. You could also use this pattern to set up a camouflage entry, possibly overnight: A=159.46 (8/14 at 3:30 p.m.); tentative B=162.20. Bears should take note, since the foregoing implies that the Nasdaq and S&P 500 will be moving higher as well as AAPL makes its way toward a potentially important target.________ UPDATE (Aug 16, 5:39): Let me make this perfectly clear: The 168.33 target (168.46 on the weekly chart) is so very compelling that I would be surprised if the top we are expecting to occur at that price did not turn out to be a very major one. I can offer no ironclad guarantee that it will be reached, but if and when it is, we should be prepared to get short there aggressively. In my estimation, there is almost no chance that a rally could blow past the target -- at least not without a very significant correction first.

Kim Jong Un was nowhere to be found Monday night, prompting headline speculation that he was preparing to launch a new missile to celebrate a public holiday. Wall Street was unfazed as always, thumbing its nose at the threat of nuclear war with a 135-point rally in the Dow Industrials. Talk about attitude!  In fact, as I noted here the other day, even a test-firing must be treated as a possible attack, since we won't know until a missile is well aloft where it might be headed.  If Los Angeles is destroyed in a fireball (see inset), it's hard to imagine how traders might react. My guess is that they would keep their cool, opening stocks moderately lower with the intention of applying a short-squeeze ahead of the evening news. As for Guam, how many of them could even find it on a map? _______ UPDATE (Aug 15, 9:15 a.m. EDT):  Kim has backed down, and the world, ex-L.A., can breathe a sigh of relief as the Dow Industrials steam toward 23000.

I've redrawn the chart to correct a target and some ABC coordinates, but the basic picture remains the same. If and when AAPL gets decisively past the 161.34 midpoint pivot shown, the stock will become an odds-on bet to reach D=168.05. AAPL has seemed unstoppable, but that is when we should be paying closest attention to even the subtlest hint of a bearish reversal.  In this case, it would come on a print Tuesday exceeding 156.97 to the downside.

VXX has plunged once again after having failed to turn the hourly chart impulsively bullish on its most recent, rabid lunge for glory. Through it all, our strategy has never wavered: Buy call options only when this crazed animal comes down to a Hidden Pivot midpoint support or 'd' target. Ours has been 10.24 for months, and until such time as VXX gets there we should prefer to do nothing at all. That's only half of a winning game, by the way, since, as we've learned in the past, even if one buys calls within an hour of an important low, one will have just nanoseconds to take profits on any subsequent price spike, since they are all inevitably fleeting. For now, though, I can counsel only more patience._______ UPDATE (Aug 18, 1:45 a.m.): I'll be removing this vehicle from the list, since, with today's upthrust, the 10.24 target that we've been looking to bottom-fish is seeming increasingly like a distraction. Let 'er rip -- and come what may!

Back in May, with AAPL trading around $150, I wrote here that the 168.46 target shown looked like a lock-up. Final progress toward that Hidden Pivot has been a little slower than I'd expected, owing mainly to a price dipsy-doodle that sidetracked the rally for about two months. But the target itself remains viable and seems likely to be achieved within the next 2-4 trading days. If you've been long for the ride, plan on adjusting accordingly. If you want to keep your stock and do covered writes against it, I'd suggest protecting your gains by shorting near-the-money call options and using some of the proceeds to buy puts at the 150 strike.  If you are flat and looking to get short with the stock topping near the target, buy puts expiring in 7-14 days with AAPL trading 168.25 or higher. If they quickly go in-the-black as we might expect, we'll roll them to a later date. The 168.46 target is very long-term, deriving from a bull market 'technical' low of $55 recorded in mid-2013. It is also sufficiently clear and compelling for us to infer that AAPL is not going to simply blow past it._______ UPDATE (Aug 10, 7:09 p.m.): AAPL fell hard with the broad averages today, but this did little technical damage to the weekly chart. The stock would have to fall a further $15, exceeding 140.06 to the downside, to alter the still-bullish long-term picture. _______ UPDATE (Aug 13, 6:05 p.m.): Friday's rally tripped a buy signal on the hourly chart, but AAPL will need to get past the 160.95 midpoint Hidden Pivot shown to imply that buyers have the gumption to shoot for the 167.84 target with which the lower number is associated. We should see tradable resistance from that number if it's reached, but

The suspense is chilling.  On Friday, two important market bellwethers, AMZN and Boeing, came down precisely to their respective thresholds of trouble before rallying out of the hole. Shortly thereafter, North Korea's nut-job dictator one-upped Wall Street's premature and unwarranted sigh of relief, announcing that his missile launchers were on standby. All of us, traders and investors in particular, have gotten used to having geopolitical crises, even seemingly world-shaking ones, blow over quickly. Not this time, I fear. Since we can't know exactly where Kim's missiles are headed until they are in the air, or what kind of payload they are carrying, we'll have to start shooting them down as they leave their launchers or silos.  That means even North Korea's test firings will have to be treated as acts of war from now on. Say Goodbye to Politics-as-Usual That's going to transcend politics-as-usual in the U.S., as even Trump's most vociferous doubters must already recognize.  It would appear that a generally complacent world is about to find out what the word 'crisis' means. It will inevitably be written someday that North Korea's dictator caused the bull market to end, assuming it has. This is poppycock; the bull has been looking for years for a good reason to end. Sitting on a precipice, all it needed was just a little shove.  Kim Jong Un won't even qualify as the Black Swan who made it happen, since his name was already near the top of every permabear's list of Things That Could Go Dreadfully Wrong.

Gold's slight breach of the 1288.00 target shown is encouraging, but the bullishness of this is merely, well, slight.  The overshoot is not sufficient for us to infer that a glorious rally lies just ahead, but if and when the next upthrust comes, look for it to hit 1300.70, an important midpoint resistance (daily chart, A=1074.10 on 12/30/15). It would take more than that, however -- specifically, a print exceeding 1307.00 -- to refresh the bullish energy of the daily chart; and still more -- i.e., a push above the election night high, 1353.00 -- to put gold back on the warpath. ________ UPDATE (Aug 10, 6:56 p.m. EDT): The futures ended the day slightly shy of the very important Hidden Pivot resistance at 1300.70 noted above (click  here for chart).  A decisive push past it, or two consecutive weekly closes above it, would put a 1461.60 rally target well in play. Buyers have failed twice this year to blast through 1300.70 in April and June. Let's see if the third try proves to be the charm. ________ UPDATE (Aug 13, 6:05 p.m.): No change. The 1300.70 resistance remains critical to my outlook for gold over the near-to-intermediate term. _______ UPDATE (Aug 14, 5:56 p.m.): If the futures slip beneath the 1285.90 midpoint Hidden Pivot support that contained today's selling, look more more downside to 1280.30, a minor retracement target that you could bottom-fish with a stop-loss as tight as four ticks (60-min, a=1295.30 on 8/14 at midnight). _______UPDATE (Aug 15, 8:14 a.m.):  For the third time since April, December Gold has receded from the 1300.70 Hidden Pivot resistance without having penetrated it decisively.  Rinse and repeat. This is neither particularly bullish nor bearish, but it does affirm my earlier advice to tune out gold until it does something worthy

Friday's weak bounce from a marginal new low suggests the selloff begun last Tuesday from a record peak at 2488.50 has farther to go. That high fell within a hair of two Hidden Pivot resistance points I'd flagged here the night before, one major, the other minor. That's why we should be prepared for a correction of greater duration than we've come to expect in 2017. If it exceeds the 2402.25 low from 6/29, the damage would begin to look serious on the daily chart. Regardless, bulls could short-circuit the correction process with an upthrust exceeding 2453.50, equal to an 'external' peak made Thursday on the way down. That would generate a bullish impulse leg on the hourly chart. If this were to occur early in the session, it would likely put buyers back in charge for the duration if not necessarily the week._______UPDATE (Aug 14, 7:32 a.m.): A nasty short squeeze off Friday's 2430.25 low has generated a bullish impulse leg on the hourly chart this morning, but I seriously doubt the futures will hit a new record high on this move. That would change, however, if the rally were to exceed 2474.50, equal to an 'external' peak recorded last Wednesday that lies 14 points beneath the all-time high made a day earlier. ________UPDATE (Aug 15, 6:36 p.m.): Today's high missed my benchmark by a point-and-a-half. Bulls will have another shot at it on Wednesday. Let's see how they do._______ UPDATE (August 16, 6:15 p.m.): Yet even closer, but still no cigar. Nudge me in the chat room if I seem to have fallen asleep. A drop below 2450.00 now would hint of trouble.

Thursday's selloff left some important questions about the health of the bull market dangling. Two stocks -- AMZN and Boeing -- could tell us as early as Friday morning whether investors have serious reason to worry. Both came within inches of Hidden Pivot correction targets after getting sold down hard. If the targets are decisively exceeded it would imply that the strength of selling in the market is now greater than the buying power that has pushed the broad averages to a continuous series of new record highs. We should also watch AAPL closely, since heavy selling in this important bellwether did no technical damage to the long-term charts. In fact, the stock, which settled at 154.95, down $6, still has an unfulfilled, very long-term rally target at 168.46.