Daily Commentary
The Morning Line
Rick Ackerman’s daily market commentary — blunt, specific, and free of Wall Street spin. Browse the full archive below.
November 20, 2022
Twitter and bitcoin share a key similarity in that their success while it lasted was just hubris. Realize that both were birthed by a virtual medium capable of monetizing turds if there is any discoverable demand for them. Cardi B’s megahit single Wet Ass Pussy was proof of this. Twitter proffered turds in the form […]
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November 13, 2022
[The following guest editorial was written by David Isham, a real estate investors from Northern California and long-time Rick’s Picks subscriber. RA] Gold Loses Status as Haven, declared a headline in the Wall Street Journal on September 22. Two days later gold fell to $1629, the lowest daily close in more than two years; then […]
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November 6, 2022
Economics, the “dismal science,” has taken quite a beating in the current election cycle. Last week, Joy Reid, MSNBC’s rising-star bimbo, tried to convince viewers that the word “inflation” has no meaning outside the academy and the newsroom. “Most people who would never use that word in their lives are using it now because they’ve […]
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October 30, 2022
The thimble-riggers who control Apple shares have done a brilliant job holding the stock market aloft. Ingeniously engineered short-squeeze rallies in the world’s most valuable stock have helped sustain the illusion that the U.S. economy will somehow muddle through a deepening recession that is still disingenuously described by Biden and his economists as a ‘rough […]
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October 23, 2022
The seemingly strong rally that ended the week merely balanced out three days of bland weakness that had preceded it. In the S&P 500, the upthr ust steepened by the hour but ultimately failed to surpass any important prior peaks. The bear seems out to challenge bulls and bears alike with its obviousness. For one, […]
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October 16, 2022
The spread between permabulls and permabears is at an extreme these days, even for October. This is the month when pessimists’ hopes are highest that an epic bear market will correct dangerous excesses that have been building up in the financial system for more than 50 years. A presumptive and welcome side effect of such […]
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October 9, 2022
A pen-pal from the world of very high-tech inventions is a self-described ‘collapsitarian’. He wrote me recently to say he enjoys these weekly screeds for their relentlessly glum insightfulness. (For your information, he is 50% in cash, 25% in gold, and 25% short stocks.) Longtime readers will know that I seldom shout ‘The Sky Is […]
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October 2, 2022
[Louie Piro, my barber when I lived in Mountain View CA shortly before Google arrived, became a multimillionaire with a simple investment strategy. I thought of him the other day when a Rick’s Picks subscriber wondered aloud in the chat room which investments are most likely to prosper in the recessionary hard times that Americans […]
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September 25, 2022
Yields on 10-Year Treasury Notes, currently at 3.70%, are likely to hit 4.90% before they level off. It is hard to imagine an increase of such magnitude not disrupting the U.S. and global economies severely. America is already in a recession that looks all but certain to deepen before we hit bottom in a year […]
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September 18, 2022
I’ve been reluctant to give permabears the all-clear because, being one myself, I’ve seen the bull market roar back from death a dozen times since 2009, turning my smug eulogies into embarrassments. The most punitive and outrageous of the rallies was the monster that emerged in March 2020, when investors cast off pandemic fears just […]
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September 11, 2022
Leave it to the pundits to tell us what the hell the stock market was celebrating on Friday. The FAANG stocks inspired an inexplicable rampage, just like in the good-old days, and everything seemed right with the world. In the view of those anointed by television producers to make sense of Wall Street’s non-stop nuttiness, […]
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September 4, 2022
Although I am on a busman’s holiday and will not resume publishing The Morning Line until Sep 17, here’s a timely note concerning AAPL. We’ve been using a 151.38 downside target that remains viable, but I expect the stock to go much lower in the months and years ahead — well beneath $100, that is. […]
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