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GDXJ entered its third week in purgatory, unable to attract the buying power to wreck the corrective pattern shown. That would take a push above the pattern's point 'C' high at 97.76. Sellers evidently were equally spent after failing to reach the secondary Hidden Pivot support, p2=86.38. My hunch is that bulls eventually will prevail, but there's not much to entice unless you're a scalper.  The turgid price action reflects similar indecisiveness in bullion futures, which have lacked direction since completing a 350-point selloff on October 22.

Sellers dragged Bitcoin kicking and screaming toward a 91,263 target that was first signaled a month ago. This was shortly after this vehicle topped at a record 126,200 on October 6.  Although bull-market corrections often take a strong bounce from the secondary Hidden Pivot, in this case p2=99,997 produced only a modest bounce last week after it had been pounded for four days.  That suggests we should attempt a 'mechanical' short at the red line, p=107,731.  The textbook stop-loss would be at 114,554, but we can craft a much tighter stop with a 'camo' trigger if the opportunity arises. ______ UPDATE (Nov 14, 10:12 a.m.): In my zeal to conceal the top-secret coordinates yielding the target above, I somehow transposed one of them. The correct target is 91,358. Any lower would indicate 89,964, but you could bottom-fish either aggressively with a stop-loss as tight as 0.2%.  At the moment, Bitcoin is enjoying a lunatic bounce precisely from the secondary Hidden Pivot (p2=94,344) of the pattern associated with D=89,964. 

[ My friend Doug Behnfield, a wealth manager and senior vice president at Morgan Stanley in Boulder, has contributed many commentaries to Rick's Picks over the years. Below is the Q3 report he sent out to clients several weeks ago. Like many observers, he is troubled by the enormous concentration of investment capital in the AI space. Can the eventual payoff ever be big enough to justify the estimated $10 trillion that will flow into AI technology by 2030? Read why Doug thinks there are better places to park your money. With apologies to him, I have dispensed  with his meticulous footnotes and several graphs to simplify typography. The Jetson's illustration was also my idea, based on his original headline, 'Thoughts on the Jetsons and Rope-a-Dope'. RA ] In late 1962, CBS introduced the Hanna-Barbera evening cartoon The Jetsons. It was inspired by their hit series The Flintstones, but set in the future. It lasted for only 24 weekly episodes, but it made an indelible impression on the Baby Boom Generation. Along with flying cars and Rosie the robotic maid, George Jetson worked two days a week, one hour per day (not remotely), and all he did was go in and push a button to start and stop a machine. (the Referential Unisonic Digital Indexer Machine, at Spacely Sprockets). I was reminded of The Jetsons when reading a Wall Street Journal article describing the rivalry between Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk in developing robots. In it, Elon Musk predicts that there will be “at least 10 billion humanoid robots in the world, remaking the idea of work and life” by 2040 (The Jetsons was set in 2062). Zuckerberg’s humanoid robotic aspirations are dependent on gathering data from the microphone and camera in his Artificial Intelligence (AI) Glasses.  With them, he intends to

MSFT's double top is so obvious that we should be cautious about believing the party is over. My read is that the dirtballs who manipulate the stock for a living had no alternatives. Although they short-squeezed earnings news for all it was worth, they lacked the wattage and the daring to push above July's 555 peak. The subsequent relapse was so nasty that it will require some time to build a base capable of supporting a push to new record highs. So many bulls got sandbagged by last week's Whoopee Cushion ride that the retracement will probably take out the 492.37 low recorded early in September. Since the stock market and Microsoft will continue to stay roughly in synch, the foregoing implies that the bull market is due for a significant and possibly protracted correction.  I have no interesting Hidden Pivot targets at the moment, but that shouldn't preclude our trading this feisty little monster between feints.

Last week's nasty chop barely recovered ground lost as the week began, when GDXJ's canny handlers orchestrated a $17 shakedown on Monday's opening. This was bullish, like all shakedowns, because its purpose was to scare widows and pensioners into selling their shares for relative bargain prices. The subsequent bounce triggered a 'mechanical' short when it reached the green line (x=93.97), but the flat price action that followed looked unpromising as a place to bet the 'don't' line. Stay tuned for updates as GDXJ gives us a clearer picture. You can do this by enabling notifications in your account dashboard and by checking the chat room regularly.

TLT continues to grind higher, perhaps to deny skeptics the inspiration they need to climb aboard early in this bull market.  It is still in its adolescence, too early to predict which tectonic financial event(s) it is signaling. The trend flouts Trump's persistent efforts to cheapen the dollar, if not to say trash it.  This is a paradox that I've explained here before, to wit: the president's bold leadership has been attracting hordes of T-Bond buyers from around the world, providing an offset to the fiscal and credit excesses Trump believes will lift the U.S. economy.  Grotesquely inflated asset prices belie the fact that, for most Americans, the economy has slipped into a deep, intractable recession.  For the lucky winners, a debt deflation and bear market in stocks awaits those whose net worth has soared mainly due to Fed easing. Regarding TLT, don't pass up an opportunity to buy it 'mechanically' on a pullback to the green line (x=89.85), stop 88.45. ______ UPDATE (Nov 7): A nasty, six-day selloff triggered the 'mechanical' buy I'd suggested at 89.85. The futures continued to fall but didn't stop out the position, since the downtrend went no further than 88.88. Maintain the 88.45 stop-loss for now and hope for a push above 90.66, since that's what it would take to put bulls back in charge. A decline that touches the stop would be the most bearish event we've seen in this vehicle since last April.

Years ago, I received death threats after writing in the San Francisco Examiner that Apple looked like it was about to go under.  That was in 1997, not long after Steve Jobs returned after a 12-year exile. Ironically, he was fired by the man he'd recruited in 1985 to run the show -- cue the hisses and boos -- Pepsi CEO John Sculley. Apple stock at the time was trading below $5, and the company's share of desktops had fallen into a seeming death spiral below 5%. The iPhone was ten years distant, and it appeared that nothing could save the company. How wrong I was! My Examiner column provoked such a firestorm that I recanted its conclusions a few weeks later. Any firm that enjoyed such fanatical support was unlikely to go out of business, I concluded. If only I'd bought a thousand shares at the time. I mention all of this because last week's hit-piece on Apple elicited nary a response -- not in the Rick's Picks 'comments' section, not on websites that feature my work -- not in my own chat room. For all I know, the think-piece went unremarked even in the blogosphere, where the leastmost of our concerns often devolve into bloody battles. Regardless, the premise of my commentary -- that shorting APPL and buying TSLA would prove to be a great trade — is on the record and will be tested by time. Gates Renounces His Religion For now, let's move on to a favorite topic, the fraudulent 'wealth effect' that has seized, if not the proletarian mind, then indeed the minds of the 20% who have most benefited from it. The latest faux-wealth superstars are Amazon and Microsoft.  Shares of the latter jumped $23 last week on earnings news that added about $300

Here's a long-term trading opportunity that seems foolproof: short Apple shares and buy Tesla. Looking out over the next 10 years, this hedge position has the potential to produce outsize profits. How could Apple stumble badly enough to make it work? This is hardly inconceivable. Since Steve Jobs died 14 years ago, the company he co-founded has demonstrated again and again that it couldn't innovate its way out of a wet paper bag. How many more iPhone versions will it take to solve the battery-drain problem? Whatever happened to the Apple car? And how about the device that was going to manage your TV and all of your home entertainment gizmos with a single remote control? Apple's new-products division has repeatedly failed to deliver, and its idea of a technological breakthrough is an iPhone camera with a longer lens and a few million more pixels. As for the AI mania that is raging in the tech sector, the Cupertino-based firm doesn't even have a horse in the race. It wouldn't be the first time an iconic company failed to keep up with the times. Here's a partial list of shockers to remind you how often this has happened: Eastman Kodak, RCA, Intel, Radio Shack, Enron, Woolworth's, Compaq, Digital Equipment Corp. and Polaroid. One could argue that none of these stalwarts achieved Apple's size or market share. True enough, but that hardly guarantees unforeseeable changes in telephony will not blindside Apple. The Pi Phone Tesla and Elon Musk, on the other hand, have the vision not only to see the changes coming, but to bend them toward opportunity. The Pi phone, a potential category killer, is a good example. Musk has repeatedly denied that this device is even on the drawing board, and Wall Street seems to believe him. But why

The 'reverse' pattern shown has worked perfectly so far, triggering no fewer than three consecutive trades that produced a profit. The first was a conventional long at the green line, followed by a short at the secondary Hidden Pivot (p2) at 4172.70.  The last, an easy winner initiated as a 'mechanical' buy at the green line (x=4071,70), remained 'live' as the week ended. This series of winners strongly implies that December Gold will achieve the 4223.20 target shown. The futures would become a compelling short at that price, assuming you've made some money on the way up and that you know how to limit entry risk to small change. I have one outstanding target at 5020 that was identified here earlier. Its provenance is not nearly as clear as the targets we've been using, however, and that's why I am going to stick with the lesser charts for the foreseeable future. If the current move should impale d=4223.20, that would open up a clear path to at least 4351.30, a tad beneath the old high at 4398; or to 4461.30 if any higher.  (For a detailed discussion of a somewhat bigger picture, see my 13:51 post in the chat room on Saturday.) _____  UPDATE (Oct 29, 11:28 a.m. EDT): While we were waiting, a $10,000 trade dropped neatly into our lap. See the chat room thread from yesterday and this morning for precise details.  _______ UPDATE (Oct 30, 6:50 p.m.): I used a big-picture chart in the chat room last Saturday to lend perspective to a discussion about gold's so-far mild correction. EWT forecasters appear to disagree about where and when the retracement will end. Since then, a lesser chart using Hidden Pivot levels has evolved to suggest the correction could already be over. This interpretation would be strengthened by a pop