Rick Ackerman

I've displayed a bullish pattern because the fall from mid-October's 112.45 peak didn't quite reach the corrective pattern's midpoint Hidden Pivot (p).  The uptrend struggled for loft last week, however, and failed by 9 cents to trigger a conventional 'buy' signal at 95.79. The trigger will remain valid until such time as GDXJ slips beneath the 'C' low at 92.66.  We'll adjust C downward if that occurs, but below 91.50, the short-term outlook would shift to bearish. Even so, a tightly stopped bid can be attempted there if you're a scalper, since it is the 'd' target of a small reverse pattern.

If the futures relapse early in the week, looks for tradable support to develop at 6483.50, a voodoo number. However, we should be careful not to underestimate the potential power of this bear rally, especially if it blows a hole in p=6716.25, a Hidden Pivot resistance that can serve as a minimum upside objective for the near term. Above it there are three 'hidden' resistance points we can monitor to gauge trend strength. They lie at 6768.50, 6812.00 and 6907.50, respectively, and a penetration of each would imply the next is likely to be reached. The last would fall somewhat shy of the old record high at 6953.75 recorded on October 30.  Since a new high could conceivably create a devastating bull trap, we should be more cautious than ever at those heights, and not without skeptici sm.

There'll be more to say about the bear market as it develops. It has taken some baby steps so far, with a 2,100-point slide in the Dow over several days, then a stunning, 1,115-point reversal to the downside after Nvidia announced strong earnings last Thursday. Talking heads and editorialists opined that quarterly numbers were not quite as sensational as investors had anticipated, but they missed the point. For just as poor earnings barely fazed stocks during the 16-year bull market, merely decent earnings are unlikely to provide more than fleeting upticks in a bear market. Get used to it, because this new dynamic will be with us until shares hit bottom years from now. With respect to Nvidia, it didn't help that Wall Street and every investor on earth was desperately counting on their earnings announcement to reverse the slide of the broad averages in the days preceding the report. When the Dow notched a record high on November 12, pundits paid scant attention to the failure of the usually feisty Nasdaq Index and the 'Cubes' (QQQ) to follow suit. Six months from now, however, this divergence will be seen as one of those bells that supposedly doesn't ring at the top. Making Disney a Has-Been Although my vantage point on Nvidia is purely technical, others saw the stock's punitive reversal as related to the questionable way they report earnings. One analyst cited the exceptionally long lag time between billings and receipts. Were the global economy to fall into recession, he notes, the manufacturer could conceivably get stiffed by strapped customers, wiping billions of dollars in profits already recorded from Nvidia's books. 'Fundamentals' undoubtedly figured into NVDA's surprising plunge, but the long-overdue deflation of AI hubris was surely a more powerful factor. I address this subject in a recent interview

Bitcoin is due for a bounce, so I've focused on the smallest possible instance of it on the hourly chart. It tripped a minor buy signal at 82,617 on Friday, then delivered an opportunity to take a small partial profit 86,685, the pattern's midpoint Hidden Pivot resistance. The overshoot of p was slight, but it is still sufficient for us to infer the bounce will achieve the 'd' target at 88,821. Scalpers can short there provide they've made a profit on the way up and that they are able to keep entry risk down to 0.1% or less. The short squeeze powering this oversold rally could be nasty, so be prepared for significantly higher prices, albeit not to a new record high.  (UPDATE: Bitcoin is a nuisance for me to track because it never stops to observe a sabbath. The analysis above was prescient and precise, as you have come to expect from Rick's Picks. However, between the time I prepared the forecast a day ago, when this symbol was trading for around 84,630, and now (Sunday morning), it has frog-leaped higher and will soon be at my 88,821 target.  I don't ordinarily publish a new slate of touts until late Sunday afternoon, but I'm going to hit the send button on this update now, since I don't want it to appear as though I am predicting the little s.o.b.'s every move with hindsight. As long-time subscribers will have observed, it is no great trick to forecast Bitcoin's hysterics precisely and consistently using the Hidden Pivot Method.)

My hardcore deflationist point of view has saddled me with a bullish bias whenever I ponder a T-bond chart. Although this allowed me to catch the October 2023 bottom just off the low, it also caused me to see the nearly two-year dirge that has occurred since as base-building for a long bull market that has yet to materialize. I don't doubt that it's coming, presumably in conjunction with the next recession. But TLT's chart suggests it could take many months before it rises and, inversely, yields begin to fall. In the meantime, look for it to scuddle sideways, with a moderate bias to the downside that would correspond to merely somewhat higher long-term rates.  Altering our expectations in this way can help diminish the distraction of believing Trump can do something about it -- i.e., about rates determined by markets, and about high levels of debt that are crushing America's middle class. He can't, and his expansionist, credit-driven economic policies will only exacerbate the bearish trend in bonds. Suppose the small rise in their price over the last two years has completely discounted the global appeal of Trump's bold leadership and the additional demand this has created for U.S. Treasury paper. In that case, it's hard to imagine a bullish surge in T-bonds when the President's inflationary policies produce the opposite of instant economic miracles: stagflation. ______ UPDATE (Dec 3): TLT is breaking down in the context of a bearish head-and-shoulders pattern begun three months ago. This is within the scope of my original tout (see above), which was intended to provide a much more accurate picture for long-term rates than the guys and gals with degrees in economics who toss darts to predict such things. Rising rates and inflation are going to increasingly hurt Trump's credibility and popularity

You can feel the ponderous weight of supply in the daily chart (see inset).  Although the pattern lacks the symmetry of a textbook head-and-shoulders formation, there are enough similarities to infer that bulls are headed for a fall. Friday's nasty bounce, a short-squeeze assisted by an army of by-the-dip dipsticks, left bears bleeding on the ropes. But because they are still breathing, expect a buoyant opening Sunday followed by a mild upward drift. DaBoyz will extract as much mileage from this non-bullish buying to reach the green line, where a conventional 'buy' signal would trigger. It's hardly a stretch to think the squeeze could continue to p=6812.50, and so we shouldn't underestimate the ability of DaBoyz to do whatever it takes to make that happen.  If they should succeed at the unthinkable and achieve new record highs, we will want to get short up there aggressively.  _______ UPDATE (Nov 17, 10:08 p.m.): See my ES posts in the chat room today if you want a road map. The updates got everything just about right from bell to bell. I will be in there again on Tuesday, calling the turns and convinced that the Mother of All Bears has finally arrived. Before November is over, the 500-point drops in the Dow we've seen lately will turn out to have been just a gentle warm-up.  Outside of the Bitcoin crowd,  investors are not quite ready to hit the panic button, so confident are they that the buy-the-dips bozos will step in at any moment. They just might, but we'll want to fade their action with increasing aggressiveness the higher they take this brick. _______ UPDATE (Nov 18, 11:18 p.m):  The futures tripped a minor 'mechanical' buy signal at 6626.75 that is predicated on a 6725.00 target.  Short there only if you've made some

Friday's carnage left the futures on track for a likely relapse to the 3976.20 target shown in the chart.  A bullish alternative would start with a rally exceeding Friday's intraday high at 4215.10. New record highs would become an odds-on bet at that height. Because the reverse pattern yielding the 3976.20 target, a Hidden Pivot support, is not obvious, bottom-fishing there is recommended. I'd suggest using a 'camo' trigger from a lesser intraday chart to do this, however, since there are several prior lows to the left that are likely to attract competition from overly eager buyers, some of whom are as clever as we are. ________ UPDATE (Nov 18, 10:29 p.m.): Buyers came back to life, giving the futures a possible reprieve. The uptrend projects to 4144.60, and a pullback to 4034.20 can be bought with a 3997.00 stop-loss. The rally will still need to exceed 4215.10 to tell us that bulls are ready for a charge to new record highs. _______ UPDATE (Nov 20, 9:03 a.m.): The futures have rallied as high as 4096 after lightly kissing the bid I'd suggested above at 4034.20 with a 4034.00 low. The subsequent rally could have produced a profit of more than $6000 per contract, but I have not established a tracking position because no one mentioned it in the chat room. The 4144.60 target has yet to be achieved, and the effort is not pretty to watch, but it remains valid nonetheless as a minimum objective.

Friday's bombed-out low pierced the red line (p=50.28) by enough to make any upward progress to the green line (x=52.35) a tempting 'mechanical' short sale.  That implies that once the fledgling downtrend gets rolling, it will fall to at least p2=48.22 in search of a foothold. Since we always want to allow for an alternative outcome, the most bullish possibility would be a rally exceeding 53.375, Friday's intraday high, before the futures can plummet anew.  It could begin from any low that doesn't exceed the secondary Hidden Pivot support at 48.22.  You can play for a bounce from there, provided you know what you're doing.

GDXJ looked impressive last week, showing resilience and pluck when quotes for physical were getting crushed.  In fact, the ETF ended the week on a 'mechanical' buy signal at 94.08 that was more than $3 in the black.  I didn't explicitly recommend the trade, but if you got aboard on your own initiative, the first by-the-book profit-taking opportunity would come at p=100.80. Regardless, a close above that Hidden Pivot would shorten the odds of the trend continuing to p2=107.51, or even to a new record at 114.22.