Goldman Sachs

Yours truly was putting out fires yesterday when Goldman vaulted past the 113.23 target I'd drum-rolled. I queried the chat room and no one appears to have bought puts, but if you did please let me know so that I can establish a tracking position. My hunch is that we'll get a better chance to short this pig, since, when it shot past the pivot, it showed a magnetic attraction to the 118.07 peak recorded in October.  To make our effort to get short fun,  I'm going to suggest getting long while we wait to get short. (This is probably what I should have suggested in the first place, since the 113 target had allowed plenty of upside.) I see no set-it-and-forget strategies for doing so at the moment, but you should stay tuned in case Goldman stumbles and give us an easy entry opportunity. _____ UPDATE (10:36 a.m. EST): Far from giving us an easy entry opportunity, Goldman has been short-squeezed sharply higher today on an opening-bell gap. This is all to the good for us, however, since it raises the prospect of a shorting opportunity near 120.70, a Hidden Pivot that is coming into focus.   At that price, the stock will have rallied 42% from the October low at 84 -- quite an achievement for the scumbuckets who have manufactured this last-gasp opportunity to distribute their shares!

We'll be attempting to short this pig every chance we get, since boom times are not coming back for the banking business. At the moment, getting short means buying some put options if and when the stock reaches the 113.23 midpoint Hidden Pivot shown.  Our strategy will be to turn the puts into a vertical bear spread by shorting puts of a lower strike on the pullback we expect from 113.23.  Stay tuned for further details once the stock is trading above 111. _______ UPDATE (Feb 1): I had triple alerts set on Goldman charts, but Tradestation failed -- as it nearly always does -- to prompt me.  We'll continue to search for an ideal place to get short nonetheless, although it's possible today's high was it.

Stay tuned if you're as keen to short this brick as I am.  We are taking a patient approach -- and a good thing, too, since the merciless squeeze that Goldman's deft handlers have applied to the scrota of bears is starting to produce some real pain.  Indeed, yesterday's opening-bar spike refreshed the bullish impulsiveness of the 120-minute chart. It also furthered the prospect of our getting long while we wait for the stock to make a targeted top suitable for shorting aggressively.  Want to join us for the ride?  Click here for a free trial subscription to Rick’s Picks.

Hey, I've got a hot tip:  Run the other way when some tipster wants to share a piece of juicy insider information with you.  What would you have done if he'd told you earlier in the week that the notoriously well-connected banking firm was about to report horrendous earnings for the fourth quarter? You'd have jumped on some put options, right? Maybe a dozen or two March 95s, which were selling for around 3.50 with the stock loitering suspiciously near $98 on Tuesday.  Guess what: The tipster got it exactly right. Goldman's earnings could hardly have been much worse -- down 58 percent for Q4.  As for the March 95 puts, does an instant double to $7.00 sound about right? In fact, they traded for as little as 92 cents yesterday, having shed three-quarters of their value in just a few short hours as the stock soared almost $10 from the previous day's low. This breathtakingly counterintuitive outcome is one of the sleaziest bear traps I've seen sprung, and although it's ultimately going to undercut the stock's credibility as it makes its way down to, oh, $10 a share years from now, for the time being, Tuesday's short-squeeze will provide exactly the kind of buoyancy that its handlers -- a bunch of goniffs that  I wouldn't trust alone with my cat -- had sought in order to unload shares on widows and pensioners.  Sometime before this swindle runs its course over the next couple of weeks, we'll want to lay in an inventory of way-out-of-the-money puts so that we can later attempt to spread off their risk when the stock eventually plummets like a brick on ginned-up "good" news. Want to join us for the ride?  Click here for a free trial subscription to Rick's Picks.

Perhaps my "hula number" below $30 will be realized after all?  At the moment, Goldman is fighting to stay above a 97.28 Hidden Pivot midpoint whose destruction would imply further slippage to as low as...the zero axis!  Now, I'm not saying the company is about to drop dead -- only that, from a technical standpoint, the stock's oscillations around the 97.28 midpoint these last few weeks corroborates the potentially fatally bearish coordinates shown in the chart.  It would be nice to think the company everyone loves to hate is indeed in a death dive, but we'll await further evidence in the form of further progress toward an intermediate-term target at 63.09.

Although we shouldn't get our hopes too high, technical evidence presented in today's tout for Goldman Sachs suggests that the stock could be on its way to oblivion. A further fall of $31 from current levels seems plausible in any case, so let's stay on top of the stock for now, the better to leverage the move.

Actually, I was kind of looking forward to it after last winter's postponement. But take a gander at today's chart and analysis for the shares of Goldman Sachs.  My worst-case number is technically impossible, as you will surmise, but a fall below $30 is hardly unthinkable.

Hey, don't get me wrong, I was actually looking forward to doing that grass-skirted hula dance in lower Manhattan -- the one that emergency surgery postponed last winter.  But at the rate this cinder block has been falling, it may yet deny me the opportunity, since my hula pledge would be negated by a drop below $30.  That doesn't seem to be in the cards at the moment, since Goldman shares bounced yesterday from within inches of the Hidden Pivot midpoint support shown in the chart .  The bad news -- bad for Goldman and its shareholders, that is -- is that the fairly precise midpoint bounce has corroborated its 'D' target of minus 9.69 (!).   Now, we know that can't happen, of course, but let me remind you that negative targets came up for Lehmann, Bear Stearns and Fannie Mae in the infamous forecast that I sent out several years ago, just ahead of the bank stocks' capitulation.

In the chat room yesterday, a longtime subscriber said he liked the risk:reward for bottom-fishing in Goldman shares right now. I'll suggest holding off until GS hits the 122.72 Hidden Pivot target shown in the chart. If it happens within the next two weeks, you should buy two September 125 calls.  Since there are so many ABC patterns that could produce alternative lows, however, I won't stand in the way of camouflageurs diligent enough to look for the turn from current levels on down. _______ UPDATE (9:59 a.m. EDT): The rally from yesterday's heavily manipulated, gap-down low looks like a distributive fraud to me because the initial run-up failed to exceed a modest shelf of supply created during the final two hours of Monday's session. Although the stock has finally lifted above that shelf this morning, it is revealing underlying weakness in having failed to do so on the first attempt. _______FURTHER UPDATE (early Thursday):  The stock came at shorts with a vengeance yesterday, but it will need to push above the May 31 peak at 142.30 before we're obliged to give it any respect. Since that is not inconceivable, camouflageurs are advised to look on the 15-minute chart for opportunities to get long. ______ FINAL UPDATE for now (July 26, 12:30 p.m. EDT): We'll put this gambit aside, reminding ourselves from time to time that when the deft mechanics who control this stock have shorts by the cahones, they don't let go.