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A recent newspaper article about superspreaders -- stadium events, concerts and outdoor festivals that effectively bathe crowds in Covid-19 -- noted that a boisterous fan can spew viral particles that remain airborne for as long as 12 minutes.  There's additional evidence that when we steep in this microscopic spume for a couple of hours, as occurs when crowds are densely seated, it increases the 'dosage' of the virus and therefore its ability to do harm. This is scary stuff, especially since no one really knows how we're going to deal with it. And yet, in the same newspaper, on the same day, we read that concert promoters expect to be back in business in 2021, that airlines foresee a resurgence next year, and so do the cruise lines. Say what?  Do they perhaps know something that you and I do not regarding the imminent availability of a miracle vaccine? Or are they absurdly optimistic simply because they have chosen to believe a different set of facts, however illogical? The mainstream media has done its part making it easier to be more upbeat on reopenings than the blog world that you are in at this moment, gushing content without attempting to make coherent sense of it. Why ruin an upbeat story with depressing facts, especially if you are beholden to advertisers for your survival? A local newspaper, the South Florida Sun Sentinel, offered a holiday-weekend entertainment section on Friday that listed myriad activities and events certain to attract an audience that will have endured its limit of cabin fever.  A local night club owner who advertises heavily in print media took the opportunity to do a little PR for the club, which features live jazz, blues, salsa, blues and a well-worn dance floor. “I’ve seen some places that could care less

With trillions of stimulus dollars raining down on America already, how much more of them does the economy need? Mnuchin and Powell differ on this, which, fortunately for taxpayers, is an argument playing out in Congress that has put any further sums on hold.  The Fed chief thinks a recovery will be at risk if additional funds are not forthcoming. Treasury's Mnuchin is on record with a prediction that U.S. growth will bounce back sharply in 2021 and says there has already been stimulus enough. If Powell's argument prevails, what kinds of things could the Fed do to open the money spigot even wider? Wonder no more. Here's a prospectus from one Abhishek Shrma, writing in the Financial Times about the threat of deflation from falling commodity prices  and the steep plunge in consumer spending. Fortunately, he notes, "the Fed and the Treasury are far from being 'out of ammunition'. They should take the following steps. First, the interest rate that the Fed pays on bank reserves should be reduced to zero (from 0.1 per cent now). Then payroll taxes should be eliminated for the rest of the year (and all those already paid this year by workers and employers refunded) until the deflation abates. This is much more efficient than more federal spending. Social Security Can Play the Market "The Treasury," Shrma continued, "should also be authorised to swap T-bills for the non-marketable Treasury securities in the Social Security Trust Fund, so that its trustees can sell them and buy common stocks. If this had been done during the 2008 crisis, Social Security would have reaped a gain of trillions of dollars, based on the rise in US share prices over the decade. Share purchases should be done via an exchange traded fund, so that the government has no

On Monday, with the Dow Industrials up nearly a thousand points on news that a Boston-based company, Moderna, has a promising vaccine, I warned that U.S. equity markets were about to start trading like a drug stock in trials. Lo,  on day two, we've already got our first inkling of how damaging even mildly disappointing news can be to asset values when Wall Street is stoked on vaccine hubris. Moderna fell hard, taking the entire stock market with it, after a reporter at the web site statnews.com expressed skepticism over the quality of the company's PR releases. "While Moderna blitzed the media," noted Newstat's Helen Branswell,  "it revealed very little information — and most of what it did disclose were words, not data. That’s important: If you ask scientists to read a journal article, they will scour data tables, not corporate statements. With science, numbers speak much louder than words." So there you have it: Hedge-fund buyers of shares trampled each other on Monday because of mere words. Maybe next time they'll be more careful.  We had better get used to this kind of craziness, because it's going to make investors' tariff-war angst last year look like a game of tiddlywinks.  And who, you ask, is Helen Branswell?  A day ago few of us had ever heard of her. On Tuesday, though, she was the most influential reporter on the planet, causing shares, ETFs and stock indexes everywhere to shed tens of billion of dollars worth of value in mere hours. Now THAT's power!  The thing is, now there will be a hundred Helen Branswell wannabes out there in the blog world eager to take on the biggest story of the century. Will investors be able to live with incontinence for the next three months as, predictably, vaccine stories continue

The chart show the pattern I would suggest using if you want to trade ES right now, or at least avoid getting on the wrong side of it. This isn't rocket science, and you need to put aside the intimidating fact that the ups and downs comprise the biggest market swings, measured in points, that have ever occurred. They are no different, as far as we should be concerned, from the patterns we would use on the 5-minute chart to trade and forecast. Note that the D rally target still leaves room on the bearish chart displayed here yesterday to allow a 200 point rally and still be bearish. I went with the bearish pattern first because I did not imagine a rally would occur so soon that would be big enough to tip me bullish. The reason I am so confident in this chart is that its point B high is legitimate, meaning it is not 'sausage', having slightly exceeded an 'external' peak well to the left. I am making no effort to comprehend the silliness of what is going on here, other than in purely technical terms. You should get it out of your heads that what is happening on the charts needs to be tied to economic reality. I am not thinking about reality, just reading the stupid chart. It says what it says, and I you needn't seek answers beyond it to make money and/or preserve capital, our main objectives. We can trade the bejeezus out of it using the same tactics we would on the five-minute chart. At the moment, the best way to cut risk down to size is by using the lesser charts to create set-ups at turning points on bigger charts. Here's a note to ourselves for later (shades of Unk!): If

Who could have imagined that the entire universe of U.S. stocks would someday trade like the shares of a small pharmaceutical company with a supposed miracle cure for cancer in the works? That, evidently, is what Wall Street has become: a drug-stock crap-shoot-on-steroids. The Dow Industrials shot up more than a thousand points Monday on word that a vaccine from Moderna was showing promise in initial tests on humans. To understand how far the Cambridge MA-based firm is from defeating Covid-19, consider what Bloomberg news had to say: "The vaccine trials are being conducted in stages, with the first test designed only to look at safety and whether or not the shot created lab markers of an immune-system response. Only in later stages of testing, to be conducted in thousands of patients starting in July, will the vaccine go up against the virus in the real world in a definitive test of whether it prevents or lessens infections." What Could Disappoint? Ah, the real world!  What could possibly go wrong between now and July to disappoint investors? For starters, the drug could prove to be a total bust. That would not be unusual in the annals of drug testing. In fact, it is far more unusual when such disappointments do not happen. Considering speculators' rabid exuberance on Monday for what is at best a longshot bet, disappointment in this case could cause shares to shed ten trillion dollars of value in day or two, in a global cascade that would make the 1929 Crash seem like a burp. To repeat: Big disappointment are the norm, not the exception, in the world of experimental drugs. Moderna's efforts are inspiring boundless overconfidence simply because speculators are conflating the urgency of finding a cure with the likelihood of succeeding at it. It is

Although the spread of Covid-19 has gripped the world with fear, there has been precious little discussion of the one thing that could stop the disease in its tracks: our natural immune systems. Although we habitually seek cures in the form of vaccines and other drugs, our bodies are capable of outperforming them with little risk to our health. This fact is well known to those who have explored cancer remedies, only to discover that even the most renowned treatment centers still employ primarily "slash-poison-and-burn" methods that have not changed much over the last 50 years. Nor could any of these tactics be said to have beaten the disease.  While surgery, chemotherapy and radiation can sometimes prolong the lives of those afflicted with cancer, they are hardly a cure. Far from it. The toxic combination of radiation and chemotherapy, for one, can have a devastating impact on the quality of one's life by destroying vital organs, blood vessels and nerve pathways, along with T-cells and the body's ability to regenerate healthy tissue. Is there a better way? Fortunately, yes. In the case of Covid-19, rather than waiting indefinitely for a miracle vaccine to come along,  here are ten steps you can take immediately to help protect yourself. This indispensable list comes from two good friends who live in Boulder, Dr. Joel Rauch and Alexia Parks. Alexia is a world-changing dynamo and one of the most remarkable women I've ever met. Joel is a retired physician, Baylor trained, who specialized in bone-marrow transplants. He has become Boulder's go-to guy for world-class triathletes, bicyclists and rock-climbers seeking a nutritional edge. Their Ten Steps spells out simple things anyone can do to help fortify the immune system against the coronavirus and other diseases.  If the plan engages you, please send a copy of

Chipotle makes its first appearance here in more than a year. A subscriber had asked about shorting into the stock's ballistic rally, but there are surely easier ways to make money. CMG's ascent into hyperspace is right up there with Tulipmania in the annals of mass folly. Ironically, the stock's bear market from 2015-18 was caused by two incidents where bacterial/viral agents had been detected in their food. Is business now better than ever, as the move into record territory would seem to imply? Hardly. It's simply benefiting from investors' desperate, heedless plunge into the shares of a relative handful of companies that can make money and perhaps even turn a profit in a time of pandemic. The weekly chart shows the stock to have topped last week a micron above a clear Hidden pivot target at 972.08. The implication is if it can close above that number for two consecutive weeks, or trade more than $20 above it intraday, D2=1107.76 will be in play. The latter target is calculated by bringing the point 'A' low down to the next obvious place. The ABC pattern is too obvious to work as perfectly as we like for purposes of producing a precisely shortable target,  but it should be good enough for government work. That means a pullback to p=760.49, however unlikely, would set up a so-so 'mechanical' buy, stop 645.92._____ UPDATE (May 19, 8:44 p.m. EDT): This rabid wolverine began the week with a $20 short-squeeze gap that has tightened the vise on shorts, if such a thing were possible. It may need a couple of days to digest the move,  but you should continue to use 1107.76 as a minimum objective in any event. Above it there is 1166.99 (120-min, A=599.78 on 4/3). More than ever, it would seem, we

Gold has struggled for three weeks to fulfill the lofty promise of early April's strongly impulsive rally. While the tedium may have discouraged bulls, particularly when one of the downswings briefly devalued contracts by nearly $100, all of the pooch-screwing has had little effect on an 1873.90 target that has been in play since April 22. The fact that nearly a month's worth of Sturm und Drang has yet to get the June contract even to the 1770.10 midpoint Hidden Pivot has been frustrating, but it looks like it will not be much longer in coming. Bulls were poised to get there when last week ended, and unless Sunday night opens with bullion caught in a game of whack-a-mole, we should count on a test of the resistance by no later than early Monday. What we should want to see then is a decisive push past the pivot, or a two-day close above it, since either would make the 1873.90 target an odds-on bet to be reached. ______ UPDATE (May 9:56 p.m.): Before this agitated hippo plummeted today for no good reason, it exceeded two peaks recorded in mid-April, one of them 'internal', the other external. That is bullish, implying this pullback is merely corrective. _______ UPDATE (May 21, 8:59 p.m.): A pullback to the green line in this chart has triggered a 'mechanical' buy, but the signal is a weak one because the pullback was not 'textbook'. Plan on sitting the day out as June Gold enters its second month of sideways tedium.

Portfolio managers' most beloved stock, the 600-pound gorilla of publicly traded companies, met all of our upside objectives last week save one: a thrust to new all-time highs. We'd been looking to short the stock when it approached this threshold -- the 'nifty trick' I'd referred to in the Trading Room. Alas, last week's high at 319.69 fell somewhat shy of January's 327.85 record. AAPL ended the week with two straight days of egregious manipulation by the usual sleazeballs. Specifically, they opened the stock well beneath the previous day's close in order to dry up sellers. This set up a flurry of short-covering on both days, but neither exceeded the previous day's highs. This smacks of distribution, and although it doesn't necessarily portend a collapse in the stock in the days ahead, it does tell us that the aforesaid scumballs were having difficulty rounding up enough suckers to float this hoax to any impressive new height. We'll watch from the sidelines until it becomes apparent whether a new herd of clapping seals is waiting to do the bidding of AAPL's canny masters. ______ UPDATE (May 18, 10:01 p.m. EDT): Perhaps we'll get a chance to short a return to the old highs after all -- not because we'll be trying to nail The Top, but because we can make money regardless of what it does, especially in spots where others fear to  tread. All you newbies watch closely, because, as I promised, this is going to be a nifty little trick.