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[Note: This essay ran earlier in the week but I am re-running it because Copper broke out today on the long-term chart, hitting a so-far high of $3.71. RA]  Copper prices are up 75% since cratering in March at $1.97 a pound. Since 'doctor' copper, with a supposed PhD. in economics, has a reputation for accurately predicting growth trends, does this mean a global boom is at hand?  This seems most unlikely, given the vast expansion of public debt used to temporarily counteract the economic effects of the pandemic.  The debt, many trillions of dollars' worth, is the direct cost of supposed stimulus, which, as any idiot can see, has catalyzed asset inflation rather than any real economic growth. Unfortunately, when the party ends there is no way we will evade repayment, even if it means depreciating the dollar to zero via hyperinflation.  There is only one alternative, a deflation that would effectively cancel all debts with a wave of bankruptcies at every level of the economy: public, corporate and private. Neither path is palatable, but it is virtually certain that one or the other, or perhaps both sequentially, will occur, since our collective debts have grown far too large to repay with hard money. Purely Speculative Concerning the chart, it shows that copper prices have stalled in a very crucial place, precisely at a $3.63/pound 'midpoint Hidden Pivot'. If the rally had instead impaled the resistance or gapped through it on first contact, it would have implied beyond doubt that prices were headed to the pattern's $5.33 target. That would be an all-time high and in theory indicative of strong global demand for copper. Could that possibly be right?  No, it could not; far more likely is that it would reflect a blowoff in purely speculative demand for tangible

Interesting times, for sure, but apparently not quite interesting enough to dampen the ardor of wildly exuberant buyers on Wall Street.  With patriots storming the doors of the Capitol and a reported shooting inside the building, the Dow Industrials still managed to finish the day with an immoderate gain of 438 points. Do the institutional chimpanzees who were doing most of the buying know something we don't? More likely is that, because they get their news from MSNBC and the networks, they were ignorant of certain developments that could profoundly unsettle America. Read all three parts of this remarkable exposé  to understand just how serious the crisis could become. If you've been puzzled by Vice President Pence's bizarre willingness to certify an election that he surely knows employed massive fraud to turn him and his boss out of office, the linked story provides a compelling motive. In the meantime, don't expect the patriots to go home any time soon. They blocked the certification of electoral results as intended, and they can probably do it again as long as they remain peacefully within the bounds of the First Amendment. Not surprisingly, the extent of the violence is being exaggerated to a brazen extreme by a news media that saw the torching of Portland as 'mostly peaceful'. For his part, Trump was so forthright in telling them all to go home that the news media will have difficulty convincing even the most ignorant viewers that he incited violence.  If you want to better understand what is going on and what is about to unfold, listen to the news with a skeptical ear. They have been wrong about everything so far, and they will be just as wrong underestimating the extent to which the world-shaking events of the next few weeks were planned

To all of my subscribers and readers, warm holiday greeting and best wishes for a happy, healthy and prosperous new year.  It begins with many troubling issues unresolved, most particularly the question of who will be the next U.S. president. Various vaccines promise to ease the pandemic, but possibly not in time to prevent many small businesses from failing.  A bright spot, particularly in states like California, New York and Michigan,  where dictatorial governors have disregarded individual rights, is that business owners are at the point of revolt. This bodes well for America, since our political leaders are obviously in need of rebuke and a reminder of whom they would serve.

The broad averages have been lapping at some long-term rally targets this week, although not so voraciously that bears should dive for cover quite yet. A 304.07 target for DIA has been exceeded so far by 1.63 points; a 312.29 target in QQQ by 2.35 points; and 12,829 target in the E-Mini Nasdaq by 89 points, or  0.6%. These Hidden Pivot resistance points have already served us well, keeping us comfortably on the right side of powerful uptrends that flouted the pandemic's fatal effect on a wide swath of the U.S. economy. Small businesses are failing by the thousands each day, creating structural unemployment problems that will be with us even if there are ten more stimulus packages yet to come. Wall Street seems not to care, as long as a handful of mega-cap companies that earn their money mainly from advertising continue to grow in value. They have been inflating 'wealth' by tens of billions of dollars each day, dulling whatever lessons investors may have learned from the last bear market. Please note that the Dow Industrials are poised to rally a further 2300 points, to at least 32,692, if the new year begins with a bang. It's hard to imagine what could stop it.

With the post-Christmas resumption of trading Sunday morning, bitcoin tacked on an insane $3,000 in the blink of an eye. Even more preposterous is that a correction one might have expected to last for at least three to five days appears to have run its course in mere hours. This has raised the prospect of cryptomoney fever achieving yet another record high before dawn. How much farther could the rampage go?  A projection using the Hidden Pivot Method suggests that the next big thrust will hit 33,600, about 6000 points, or 22%, above these levels. But why should it stop there, we might ask, with mass hysteria's Olympus beckoning at 100,000? We'll be better able to assess whether bulls have the gumption to get there once we've seen how they handle the 'hidden' resistance at 33,600. If this proprietary pivot is dramatically impaled on first contact, be prepared for a burst to 50,000, a marquee-quality number that would be in play simply because I will have run out of Hidden Pivot targets. Support from Billionaires Disclaimer:  I think bitcoin is, if not a hoax, then a cleverly marketed scheme on the order of alchemy and cold fusion. I get emails all the time from bitcoiners convinced cryptocurrency should be prized over all other investable assets, particularly gold. The most fervent believers are robinhoodies and millennials with little experience of precious metals, other than as jewelry that old people wear. At gold's expense, they have helped push bitcoin into its second speculative mania, the first having ended woefully in 2018. The collapse that year took it from an all-time high of 19707 down to 3134. The current short-squeeze supernova has much more power behind it, however -- not only from speculative excesses fueled by buyers too young to know about or

Statistical and anecdotal evidence suggest that if you are elderly and want to survive Covid-19, you should move to a red state.  Here in Florida, Governor Ron DeSantis has imposed few restrictions, yet somehow we are not dropping like flies. The Sunshine State in fact is well down the list of places where the pandemic is alleged to be winning, but it is surely not because we are tightly locked down and masked 24/7. To the contrary, everyone who lives and works here is free to do pretty much as he pleases, subject to the test of common sense.  I suspect there are millions of us who wear masks not because we are persuaded that the science behind them is correct, for it is muddled at best, but to be polite and to humor those who think a loosely attached, cotton face cone purchased from CVS could somehow shield one from Covid's submicroscopic, infinitely clever airborne spores. Life goes on hereabouts in any event. Outdoor concerts and street fairs, though not explicitly forbidden, are few and far between not because we are afraid of outdoor crowds, but because promoters fear they'll lose money on such events. A Witch-Hunt In my gated community, the three golf courses are more crowded than ever, and nearly all amenities are open, including dining rooms, fitness center, salon, neighborhood swimming pools, pickleball and tennis courts. Not everyone chooses to use them, however, and some neighbors, including one of my oldest friends, are so paranoid that they will not even touch a ping-pong ball or billiard cue that has been handled by someone else. Science tells us that Covid does not transmit very well on surfaces; but better not to touch anything at all, some evidently believe, than risk dying from contact with a contaminated ping-pong

I'd be lying if I told you I smell a top. That would be like noticing a fart in a coffee roasting plant. With exuberant expectations of stimulus until kingdom come, the rapturous aroma of Kona dark is all that investors detect when they sniff the air for the scent of trouble. After all, what could possibly go wrong?  Even at full-tilt war, Democrats and Republicans still agree on one thing -- i.e., that the money spigot must remain open no matter what. They differ only as to a timetable and how many trillions of dollars should be force-fed into the economy in the next round.  Meanwhile, companies are so flush with cash that they don't know what to do with it all  -- other than the obvious: buy back their own shares.  And now comes a vaccine said to render Covid-19 harmless in 94% of those who get two shots spaced weeks apart. All this aside, I am not relying on my sense of smell -- which is to say, my instincts -- to warn of trouble just ahead. However, I do see distinctive topping patterns in the charts of no fewer than three important trading/investment vehicles.  Subscribers should be familiar by now with the precise details, including price targets and some cheap ways to get short. Even if it turns out that I have overestimated the threat of a major selloff, you should still be on high alert. If a rally instead impales my Hidden Pivot resistance points, we can always go back in the water and surf Mavericks with the crazies.

Here was a reassuring headline last week from Forbes online:  Airbnb’s Higher Valuation Is Reasonable.  What a relief! We can always count on the financial news media to provide a list of reasons why a stock is not overvalued no matter what its price. The trouble is, the story appeared before ABNB went public last Thursday. The IPO had been pegged at $56-$60 per share, amounting to a valuation of around $35 billion. However, when the stock actually began to trade, it opened at $146 and rose in minutes to $165. That’s a valuation of more than $100 billion – not bad for a business that has been drowning in red ink since the pandemic hit last spring and which even before then was challenged to bring any revenues down to the bottom line. “The new valuation,” continued Forbes, referring to the $60/share benchmark, “changes nothing about the firm’s business but increases the execution risk of management achieving the expectations baked into the stock.” Ahhh, "execution risk"! That's a quaint old term used mainly to downplay the possibility that a company might not be able to live up to shareholders’ greediest expectations. In the case of ABNB, it would seem that investors are looking many years ahead, to a time when the pandemic is recalled with nostalgia, and when residential neighborhoods have become so densely packed with wayfarers that local restaurants and hostelries will have to turn away business. Not Doing the Math The recent IPO of Door Dash, the eternally profitless meal-delivery service, looks even worse than ABNB’s. The seven-year-old startup lost $667 million in 2019 and another $149 million through October of this year. And yet, when DASH’s shares began to trade last Wednesday, they achieved an 85% mark-up above their IPO price instantly, equating to a market

The yellow flag is out now that the obsessively owned Russell 2000 Index has topped 14 cents from a long-term Hidden Pivot target.  IWM, an ETF proxy for the small-cap-heavy Russell index, has rolled down from 192.81, slightly beneath a 192.95 Hidden Pivot resistance I'd drum-rolled in the Rick's Picks chat room Wednesday morning and on Facebook and YouTube a day earlier. Some subscribers were able to leverage the potentially important high by buying Jan 22 140/150/160 put butterfly spreads for around 0.20 as advised. Please report any fills in the chat room, but don't chase the trade. IWM plunged nearly $5.00 after coming within pennies of the target. Although it rebounded modestly toward the end of the session, the burden of proof will remain on bulls until such time as IWM closes above 192.95 for two consecutive days. We will try to get short again if this happens, since there is another target between current levels and 200 that looks capable of delivering another enticing longshot bet. I'd characterized the trade as speculative but still worth a look. We are getting theoretical odds of 50-to-1 against a collapse in the Russell index by late January, and the most we can lose is around $20 per butterfly. Theoretical upside potential is $1000, although in practice exiting for $700 or so would be a pretty good trick. Note that that would still be getting 35-to-one -- not bad in a market as vulnerable as this one. Chimp Geniuses We have focused increasingly on the Russell idex in recent months because it has turned white-hot. The heat was applied by chimp geniuses paid absurd sums to throw Other People's Money at a handful of stocks they've all agreed on. They realized one morning that they were immersed in insanely overvalued mega-cap 'lunatic