Rick Ackerman

Judging from the ease with which buyers pushed through the midpoint resistance at 4558, the futures are headed to at least 4950.00, the Hidden Pivot rally target shown in the chart.  The pattern is too obvious to be of much use for getting short with pinpoint accuracy , but it will probably do for government work. It lies 5.3% above these levels, compared to a very important target in MSFT that is 8% above. Those two numbers could synch up nicely if the tech stock's ascent continues to outpace the S&Ps.

Just a small push this week will bring AAPL up to the green line, where it would become a promising 'mechanical' short. I would expect a profitable pullback to at least the next level, p=187.47, but I doubt the stock is ready to fall into the abyss. To remind you: The green line (x=193.54) is not a support, resistance, Hidden Pivot or target, just a place at or near which we sometimes initiate trades.  We'll look for an opportunity to do so with a risk-averse 'camouflage' set-up when the stock reaches the line, presumably on Monday if Friday's nutty wilding spree continues.

The dollar made yawn-worthy headway last week with a one-day leap for who-knows-what-reason. The single prior peak the move surpassed on the daily chart was an 'internal' rather than the 'external' we require to signal a true impulse leg. The first such 'external' lies at 104.26, and it can serve as our minimum requirement for signaling a move capable of rejuvenating the long-term bull begun in 2011. Even then the rally would be suspect, for it would still fall well shy of the  107.99 'external' high from November 2022 where a bull run crapped out last October. Our skepticism and a high bar are warranted, since the dollar must weather a Treasury auction calendar for 2024 that will require $8.5 trillion of borrowing to finance rollovers and U.S. budget outlays. Please see my current commentary for additional notes on this.

Gold has relapsed to the green line twice since triggering what had looked like a fine mechanical buying opportunity shortly before Christmas. It has done little since but tease, vex and antagonize, but if past is precedent, the tedium will be broken soon by a big rally to the 2184.80 target shown. That's no assurance that buying now, at levels beneath where we might have been long anyway, will produce a better trade. Since the futures remain in theory a good bet to rally back up to p=2086.40, we'll continue to look for ways to get aboard with risk tightly controlled. The entry risk for the 'textbook' 'mechanical' buy was $20k on four contracts.

Although Feb Gold had the decency to leave us with a little hope, Silver is not being so kind. Its clean destruction of the midpoint pivot (p=22.868) leaves little room for doubt about whether the weakness of the last month will continue on down to the 22.01 target shown. In the meantime, we should plan to get short on a blip to the green line (x=23.295), since the 'mechanical' aspects of the trade look promising. The pattern may also be gnarly enough to use D=22.015 for bottom-fishing.

TLT feathered down to the 93.23 midpoint support of the pattern shown, but the low created by the small bounce so far from this Hidden Pivot will need to be tested before we can infer the bull trend begun in October remains healthy. The corrective move could come all the way down to D=85.89 without damaging the recovery. However, the presumptive power of the next rally leg will be greater if the correction from December's 100.57 peak goes no lower than p=93.23. This is the case so far, since last week's low occurred at 93.26.

This mudder was a hair shy of triggering a conventional 'buy' signal at the green line when last week ended. My gut feeling is that the signal will ultimately produce a profit with a move at least to the red line. Why should Mr Market be so kind to us?  Don't count on it. More likely is that although the futures will indeed reach the red line, this will occur on a gap through x=33.94 that leaves our bid choking on dust. Even so, we can always try to get aboard by outsmarting the s.o.b. _______ UPDATE (Jan 22, 11:12 p.m.): A gratuitous new low has brought the green line down to 33.92 and the red one to 34.53.

When forecasting stock prices, it helps to view the market as a crazed creature driven by fear, greed, and most of all, stupidity. Of course, everyone but the "theme"-obsessed chimpanzees who purport to manage your money understands that the stock market's heedless ascent into horrifying news is rock-bottom stupid.  In this case, the very bad news coming is already known: Treasury borrowing over the next twelve months will dwarf anything that has ever been attempted before. "The volume to be financed in U.S. Government debt is staggering, historically unprecedented, and absolutely impossible," writes my colleague Jim Willie. Nearly $1.6 trillion will be needed to finance outlays for fiscal year 2024, and an additional $7 trillion of maturing debt must be rolled, much of it into paper of shorter duration.  "That comes to around $800 billion per month, when $100 billion has been difficult on a monthly basis," Willie notes. It will occur at a time when sovereign buyers of U.S. debt, particularly China, have been dumping T-bonds. The extremely heavy auction calendar portends a sharp rise in interest rates that threatens to crush corporate earnings, create a tsunami of bankruptcies and trip the U.S. economy into deepest recession. The shock of it would be made worse by the brazen statistical lies The Guvmint has fed us concerning GDP growth, hiring and the supposed health of the economy. All have been egregiously overstated in an election year, gobs of bright lipstick on a pig. Triggering 'Stupid'  This grim picture, in contrarian fashion, appears to have triggered the 'stupid' factor into overdrive, sending stocks soaring on Friday as though the U.S. and global financial picture were just peachy. How long can this gusher of mass hysteria last?  Once again, I turn to a chart of Microsoft shares for the answer. It still

We'll need to be on our guard as the S&Ps frolic in the discomfort zone, just an inch above the then-record highs recorded at the start of 2022. The Mother of All Tops is very likely to come with a series of upward spasms, each of which creates a marginal new high. However, looking casually at this chart, the eye 'wants' to see one of those highs occur on a nasty and distinctive spike that presumably would disembowel the last remaining shorts. This may require a running start from below 4500, and if the futures were to fall to there now, I would still expect one last run-up. Meanwhile, Microsoft seems no less likely to reach the 430 target I've been drum-rolling as a bellwether, even if the process is as fraught as the one I've described above for the S&Ps.