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The over/under bet on coronavirus is tough to handicap, given the wide range of opinions about how far and fast the disease will spread.  Some supposed experts evidently think as many as 30 million people could die. President Trump, on the other hand, says everything is under control and not to worry, at least about America. My own expert, a Berkeley-based epidemiologist, says you needn't be concerned about catching it yourself if you don't travel. Airports and airplanes are literally where the virus takes wing, but if you stay put in your own little town/hamlet/city, there is no reason for concern, he says. A Three-Day Rarity Unless, perhaps, you own shares in United, American or any other carrier that does a lot of long-haul flying. The stock market has taken quite a hit already, having finally come up against a wall of worry it could not scale in mere hours. Shares fell Tuesday for the third consecutive day, an occurrence so rare that you need to pore over charts with a magnifying class to find another instance of this over the past eighteen months.  The S&P 500 Index tripped a signal to get short on Monday, but in the space of just one day it was closing on the first profit-taking level we'd advised, 3096. The actual sell signal came at 3245 -- exactly 148 points, or 4.3%, below the all-time high at 3393 achieved just a week ago.  If the S&Ps were to fall all the way to the 2800 target shown in the chart, that would amount to a 17.4% drop -- 2.6 percentage points shy of bear-market territory. Will this happen? Almost certainly. The bull market has not had a 20% correction in more than a decade, so it is long overdue. No more perfect opportunity to

Pay no mind to reports that a big player unloaded $3 billion worth of gold contracts into Monday's tidal surge in bullion, knocking quotes down by $37 before the session ended. In the first place, we were ready for this 'surprise', since the intraday high at 1691.70 occurred less than a dollar from an important rally target I'd begun drum-rolling several weeks ago. More significant is that at its peak, the upthrust slightly exceeded a midpoint Hidden Pivot resistance associated with a D target at 2285.90. This is shown in the chart, and although it will take a more decisive penetration of p=1666 to put D solidly in play, gold's strength over the near term is likely to feed off a stock-market selloff that has farther to go.  If and when the futures blow past 1666, institutional whales like Monday's big seller in gold will be powerless to stop it. _______ UPDATE (Feb 25, 6:35 p.m. EST):  Although gold has given up $60 of its recent gains in the last two days, sellers have had to work hard to pull it down to bargain levels. This feels bullish, as does the tentative bounce the April contact took from the 1629.50 Hidden Pivot support shown in the chart. Let's see how well the good guys perform today. If they can push the futures above the 1666.70 point 'c' of the pattern shown in the chart, they'll be back in the driver's seat. _____ UPDATE (Feb 26, 8:28 a.m.): Gold is timid today, down $15 at the moment and acting spooked by a patently phony, feeble rally overnight in index futures. It will turn around only if and when stocks dive anew. The good news is that they have MUCH further to fall before they achieve the 20% correction 'required' to qualify

AAPL's spectacular swan dive has created a very powerful impulse leg on the daily chart -- one that bulls are unlikely to recoup quickly via the usual, raucous short-squeeze. There will be vicious squeezes nonetheless, but the more violent they are, the more effectively we can use Hidden Pivot levels to get in and out of trades. This was a salient feature of the dot-com crash two decades ago, and I doubt it has fundamentally changed. Looking just ahead, you can use this chart to get a handle on the stock's behavior, however erratic. We'll pay particular attention to 'mechanical' set-ups -- not necessarily to trade them, but to give us an additional edge over other market forecasters. _______ UPDATE (Feb 25, 6:43 p.m. EST): After selling off steeply, the stock bounced from within an inch of the 285.53 midpoint Hidden Pivot support shown in the chart. I doubt the rally will get legs, but we'll have to wait and see. If it relapses and takes out the pivot, the 267.82 'D' target with which it is associated would be in play. _____ UPDATE (Feb 27, 8:47 p.m.): Here's how that 267.82 target looks on a chart. I like it even more now than I did two days ago. _______ UPDATE (Feb 28, 7:05 a.m.): AAPL has overshot the 267.82 target by a whopping $4 so far.  At first I though this might be because the company is more exposed than most to coronavirus, which is true. That explanation won't wash, however, since I've always maintained here that stocks drive the news rather than the other way around. When I redrew AAPL's bearish ABC pattern so that it follows the coordinates I used to nail the overnight lows in the Mini-Dow and the E-Mini S&Ps precisely, however, I come up

In the wake of today's thousand-point selloff in the Dow, we're going to be hearing ad nauseum from every shill on Wall Street about how investors should stay the course. Most will be ignorant of technical analysis, or even disdainful of it, but I'd suggest keeping your guard up while the charlatans trot out PE ratios, valuation models and their own curve-fitted stats and charts to explain why the Dow is going to 50,000. My own indicators do not yet allow for a confident call on whether the bull market is dead, but those who have followed Ricks Picks for any length of time, or even for just the last few weeks, will know that we can hit the big, small and medium swings with sufficient precision and consistency to take most of the uncertainty out of the game. We did this in AAPL with a heavy dose of skepticism when the stock was rampaging suspiciously toward new record highs last week; in gold, which topped 90 cents above a 1690.80 target we'd drum-rolled weeks ago; and in the E-Mini S&Ps, whose massive selloff today turned just a millimeter from the target shown in this chart. Distributing Share to the Rubes Many traders must have been frustrated when, a few weeks ago, stocks initially shrugged off scary reports about the spread of coronavirus.  Although shares fell for a day-and-a-half, the subsequent rally would have caused otherwise cautious investors to doubt themselves. Mainstream analysis of the rally was invariably accompanied by news stories suggesting the virus was not spreading as quickly as had been feared.  This self-serving interplay between sleazy promoters on Wall Street and their benighted lackeys in the news media is why, without tongue in cheek, we frequently characterize the stock market as one big carnival midway. For in

The S&P 500 triggered a major sell signal today on a 112-point decline, putting in play the 3096.36 midpoint Hidden Pivot support (p) shown in the chart as a minimum downside target.  This is the third such signal in the last 14 months, but it should be presumed more likely to pan out because it occurred on a gap down through the green-line trigger price.  Although this should temper our enthusiasm for buying the dips, it has not negated the possibility of using a 'counterintuitive' setup to get long over the next three or four days. Here's a piece of the chart taken from its right-hand edge that shows the relevant pattern. Today's low occurred so close to some important bottoms recorded in December and January, that we can assume most traders and investors are very worried about a possible breakdown. Such fears are exactly what the 'CI' trade was designed to exploit and leverage. The details of this tactic are proprietary, but I will be sharing them in the Trading Room, so stay tuned if you're interested. Regardless of whether the buy signal is triggered, the way the pattern plays out can give us a confident read on whether fear is about to supplant greed as the main force driving U.S. stocks. _______ UPDATE (Feb 25, 7:15 p.m. EST): Today's steep selloff brought the S&Ps to within easy distance of the 3096.36 threshold where we would take at least a partial profit if the trade had been done with real money. Our interest is more on the analytical and predictive side, but I am hereby establishing a tracking position and will book a hypothetical gain if the 3096.26 pivot is hit.  This will allow us to assess trend strength as we normally would in any vehicle. Accordingly, if SPX

Now that we are hearing stories about the viral threat of superspreaders, of deepening economic paralysis around the world, and how it could take 18 months to produce a vaccine, investors' show of bravado in recent weeks seems to have melted away. Shares got hit across-the-board on Thursday and Friday, and if investors know what's good for them they'll pound the bejeezus out of them this week. Although it's difficult to estimate how much selling will be necessary to discount some worst-case possibilities, including a sharp global downturn, it was at least a step in the right direction for traders to belatedly acknowledge with the hesitant, two-day selloff that they simply don't know how things will play out. It is frequently said of investors that they fear uncertainty more than anything else, and so the weakness that ended the week would have been a comfort to those who have wondered when even a faint sign of rationality would emerge on Wall Street. Betting Against Buffett Looking just ahead, a third consecutive day of selling would be extremely rare and suggest that investor psychology may have shifted after being fearlessly bullish for most of the last 11 years. As always, we'll be watching AAPL in particular, since it is the key bellwether for discerning the mindset of the institutional investors who literally own the game. Warren Buffett is conspicuously among them. Berkshire Hathaway reportedly holds $78 billion worth of Apple shares, about twice what the investment firm paid for them, and Buffett is not the sort who is likely to cut and run just because a global economic slowdown threatens. His steady nerves are what permabears will be up against if they expect the stock market to simply fall apart. Think of Boeing, which hasn't had a single good-news day in

How might a commie-loving nut-job become our next president? Although it seems unlikely at the moment, a Sanders victory is hardly unthinkable. Just do the math. At present the popular vote splits down the middle while the electoral map tilts ever-so-precariously red; national elections are therefore a toss-up. Trump would likely win if the election were held tomorrow, mainly because the economy is doing so well, at least on the surface. We'll put aside the unpleasant fact that these supposed boom times have not alleviated fatal levels of public and private debt even slightly and that many trillions of investment dollars have been recklessly pumped into the shares of companies that either produce nothing, lose money or both. Now suppose young adults do something they've never done before: show up at the polls in droves. If their turnout were phenomenal, as well it might be, that could swing the election to Crazy Bernie. Why would millennials Uber to grimy urban voting stations when they could be enjoying the day doing what they love -- i.e., washing down wedges of inventively seasoned avocado toast with mango-flavored hard seltzer as they swap climate-change horror stories? Bolsheviks at Heart Well, this time they've got a powerful reason to vote, since they sense that their huge cohort, nominal taxpayers between the ages of 23 and 37, comprises the biggest generation of economic losers America has ever produced. This has made them political zealots, fired up with such vengefulness as only middle-class, self-perceived have-nots could possess. They are Bolsheviks at heart, ignorant of the blessings capitalism has bestowed on them, and not given to pondering the destructive logic of Bernie's crackpot economic schemes. In my doomsday scenario, stocks are topping as I write these words and about to enter the Mother of All Bear Markets.

Index futures were wafting higher Tuesday night, evidently unfazed by mounting evidence that coronavirus has already slowed the pace of global economic growth significantly.  Such worries as occupy portfolio managers' tiny, fevered brains these days centered on Apple, the most valuable company in the world. (I don't count Aramco because, well, who cares that it's actually bigger?) The Cupertino manufacturer of egregiously overpriced cellphones and accessories, and of late an aspirant in the overcrowded streaming-content business, announced Monday afternoon that Q1 results would take a big hit from work slowdowns and weakened sales in China. Apple shares had to play along with the announcement, since it would have been unseemly and even a little bizarre for the stock to have risen on such news, emanating as it did from Apple's own PR desk. Other stocks in the FAANG/lunatic sector were not so deferential, however. Most chalked up solid gains on the day, implying they are chomping on the bit as they wait for Apple's troubles to be perfunctorily discounted and forgotten in perhaps a few more days. (Note: Technically, AAPL looks primed to fall for reasons covered in my latest tout, below.) That the FAANGs and other multinational giants are themselves vulnerable to the same virus-related forces affecting Apple will not likely be a concern on Wall Street, where the sole imperative is to throw Other People's Money at a relatively small handful of stocks.  Actually, Apple's bearish guidance may ultimately help this Ponzi scheme along, since it will afford analysts an easy opportunity to do what they are paid to do: underestimate earnings ahead of each new round of quarterly reports. _______ UPDATE (Feb 19, 8:30 p.m.): I hadn't imagined Apple's bearish announcement would be forgotten in mere hours. While I'd expected Sunday night's selloff to continue for at

On February 2, based on reports from subscribers, I established a tracking position of 400 shares @ 28.39. I am still suggesting that you exit half at 29.42, but we'll keep the remainder for a shot at much higher prices (see chart inset). If GDX eventually reaches the 36.66 target, we could book a profit of as much as $1,886. It could take a while, but we've already proven we can endure a brutal grind waiting to collect our first payoff. It is not yet in the bag, though, since the stock was still 27 cents shy of the 29.42 profit target at today's high. Fortunately, the uptrend looks sufficiently robust to get us there on Wednesday. This trade is what I've described to you in the past as the kind of no-brainer opportunity Rick's Picks tries to offer from time to time in order to make your annual subscription pay for itself, even if you rarely follow my touts, Trading Room instructions or 'request session' actionable ideas. GDX offered a relatively cheap play, and the trade could have been done on margin in an account with less than $12,000 (or $6,000 if you halved the size to 200 shares). The trade was deliberately chosen and precisely timed to address subscribers' keen interest in gold and to ameliorate their recurring frustration trying to make money in a precious metals sector that has been become notorious for misbehavior. The actual buy recommendation was simple and straightforward, allowing subscribers to buy the stock pennies off the bottom of a hellish dive. We subsequently came close to getting stopped out on a relapse, and although our grueling 'hold' caused me to lose patience at one point, I stuck to my discipline and let the trade run. I hope you learned something valuable about