Rick Ackerman

Although my immediate outlook for gold futures is bullish, Friday's thrust in this vehicle looks like a fake. It would have gotten more boost if it had occurred from just beneath October's 30.46 bottom, and that is where I expect DaBoyz eventually to engineer an authentic turnaround. More immediately, GDXJ would become an appealing 'mechanical' short at either the red or green line. We'll pass up the opportunity but use these benchmarks nevertheless to gauge trend strength. _______ UPDATE (Mar 5, 6:35 p.m.): The bullish reversal from last Wednesday's low turned decisive with today's pop through an 'external peak at 35.25 recorded more than a month ago. It is still more bullish because the low failed to come down to p2=30.68.

T-Bonds have been on a theoretical buy signal since February 23, when this vehicle popped through the green line (x-93.40).  The minimum upside objective is p=94.80, but we'll be more interested to see how buyers interact with that 'hidden' resistance than in trading GDXJ. A quick and decisive push past it would provide a tailwind for a move to as high as 97.58 over the next several weeks. _______ UPDATE (Mar 9): Last Tuesday's gap through p=94.80 all but guarantees the rally will reach a minimum 97.58, the 'D' target of this pattern. An easy move through that Hidden Pivot resistance would imply that the bull cycle begun from 82.42 last October is about to surge anew.

The Dollar Index has been on a buy signal since January, with potential over the next several months to D=108.38. A fall to the green line (x=102.56) would be widely interpreted as bearish, but as the chart makes clear, the move would be corrective and set up an attractive 'mechanical' buying signal.  The struggle at the red line (p=104.50) suggests the dollar is in no hurry to reach D, with the possibility that it will not reach it at all, or at least not for a long time.

The endgame inched closer to singularity last week with rigged rallies in stocks that had rightfully been given up for dead.  There was the more than doubling in the price of Beyond Meat, for example.  Until last week, shares of the veggie-burger upstart seemed content to scuddle sideways on a tortuous path to death. At $7 a share, the stock had lost 97% of its value since peaking at $240 after its 2019 debut  When it was apexing, Wall Street incited the usual wack-jobs into believing that meatless burgers were the food of the future. Cattle ranchers parried this nonsense with a campaign that emphasized why real meat was better for you. They needn't have worried, however, since most people had already discovered that real meat also tastes a lot better. Carvana is another stock to have received premature last rites from Rick's Picks. Consumer complaints about the used car dealer had been piling up mountainously, like grievances against the airlines, causing the stock to pancake from $376 to under $4.  Its clever handlers managed to waft it back up to $40, which eventually became a launching pad for an undeserved pop last week to $80. Watch for freaked-out shorts to continue covering their bad bets in the weeks ahead, giving the stock an artificial boost before it finds well-deserved obscurity in the low teens during the next recession. Two Kinds of Sardines Even so, if Carvana had just one Pontiac Aztek or an AMC Gremlin sitting on a lot, the company's intrinsic value would exceed that of the world's entire supply of bitcoin. This inconvenient fact seems not to have deterred speculators from bidding up BTC to $64,000 last week, where it sat poised to take on the all-time high at $70,000 recorded in November 2021.  We expect the

I'd expected a modest pop to the 24.08 target of a reverse pattern to start the week. Instead, March Silver stumbled as it emerged from the gate, disappointing bulls yet again and providing yet more evidence that the bull market from hell is on its own time. My hunch is that the target will be achieved, but only after the futures have come down to the 22.385 target of the small rABC pattern shown. This calls for bottom-fishing with a 'camouflage' trigger, meaning an abcd pattern of small degree (the 15-minute chart should do).

The futures rallied last week to within a hair of the 5128.50 Hidden Pivot target sent out to you last Sunday.  The forecast came with an explicit, high-confidence recommendation to get long if the uptrend pulled back to the green line (x=4984.50). This it did on Tuesday, subsequently producing a profit of as much as $7,200 per contract for anyone who did the trade.  I followed up on Friday afternoon with a suggestion to buy SPY 1 March 498 puts. (See my chat room link to the gnarly chart that informed this decision. ) Most subscribers were able to buy them within a penny of their intraday low, 0.37, so we'll have a horse in the race when index futures resume trading on Sunday.

The hourly chart is mildly bearish, albeit with no hint of a major top. That's why I've reproduced the weekly chart, with its compelling target at 430.58, as a reminder of how close the stock is to hitting a resistance that it is unlikely to penetrate, much less brush aside. It will have help putting in a top from a few other lunatic-sector faves, including CMG and NFLX, which have maxed out their respective weekly charts. If MSFT struggles to push above Friday's  412.06 high for a day or two, that would leave it vulnerable to a 50-point fall over the near term. We won't attempt to short it, though, unless it pops to  430, so stay tuned.

So much for the wall of worry!  Optimists and visionaries supposedly climb it while ignoring troublesome signs that leave most investors on the sidelines, paralyzed with fear. Last week, as soaring shares of Nvidia tugged stocks higher around the world, speculators swarmed the wall like cockroaches gorging themselves on dried beer, glue and animal feces. Do insects ever pause to worry? More likely is that even the dark shadow of a size 14 shoe descending on their wretched banquet would not quiet the feverish din of a hundred thousand mandibles crunching away. And so it is these days on Wall Street, scene of an epic wallow that is far removed not just from worry, but from reality. The so-called Magnificent Seven -- we have always referred to these stocks, more appropriately, as the Lunatic Sector -- all by themselves created more than a trillion dollars of 'wealth' in just the last week or so.  This occurred when stocks took volumeless leaps on earnings announcements whose details, whether bullish or bearish, were of scant concern. No one maintains any longer that this is rational behavior. But leave it to Wall Street's hype machine to tell us that earnings eventually will catch up to the craziness. Really? Celebrate This! The megastocks have gone vertical at a particularly unsettling time.  Commercial real estate is collapsing, government is doing most of the hiring, brutal price increases for nearly everything have crushed middle-class purchasing power; and borrowers, led by the U.S. Treasury, will need to refinance more than eight trillion of debt this year at significantly higher rates. To make matters worse, inflation is poised to take off again, in part because of higher costs incurred by shippers avoiding Houthi missiles in the Suez. Under the circumstances, it is far more likely that the next

Crude is the most agitated trading vehicle I track, but paradoxically the easiest to trade. We can practically count on every tradable price reversal to come from within a tick or two of an in-your-face-obvious prior high or low -- i.e., from smack-dab-in-the-middle of a 'discomfort zone'. The pattern shown has a rally target at 80.30, and we know from experience that the political powers that be and their lackeys will be there to impede the uptrend, lest gasoline prices become problematical for voters nine months ahead of the election. The pattern is also an inch from triggering a textbook 'mechanical' buy at the green line. Watch it develop if you are bored. _______ UPDATE (Feb 23): The green line (x=76.71) could have been used to make as much as $2,200 per contract with little difficulty, since the futures made a nearly two-level move after dipping slightly below the line on Wednesday morning. A subscriber reported having used UCO to do the trade. Here's the chart. The 80.30 target given above remains valid.