I don't like this bullish pattern as much as the one I've featured in the Gold tout, but it is certainly good enough for government work. It suggests that May Silver will become a fetching 'mechanical' buy when it touches the green line (x=77.043). Keep in mind that x is not a support, a target or a Hidden Pivot, just a place where we organize certain types of trades. The implication is that the futures could keep falling all the way down to c=63.667 before they turn around. At that point, the position would be showing a loss of slightly less tha $67,000 per contract. Obviously, the trade is only for those who can handles the risk and who know how to set up small-pattern triggers to get aboard. Because of the look of the pattern, the trade rates a '7.8', which, although very appealing, is significantly lower than my rating for the gold trade.
The short-term bearish picture for this symbol is congruent with my outlook for Comex gold and silver. Since trading is all about avoiding bumping heads with a thousand clowns, we should wait until GDXJ stops them out with an inevitable dip beneath the twin lows from early February pennies beneath 121. On the daily chart, the trigger interval for getting long thereafter would be 3.65 points, but we can probably cut that by 90% by pulling a trigger pattern from the lesser intraday charts.
My regular commentary will resume next week when I my return from a busman's holiday on the West Coast. In its place is an excerpt from Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain that holds an epiphany for the way we experience and recall the passage of time. It has been published here before, but this version was masterfully shortened and simplified by ChatGPT so that more readers could understand and appreciate it. The original can be found in the chapter “Excursus on the Sense of Time” in several translations. RA There is something peculiar about deliberately settling into a new place—making the effort to adjust, to feel at home—only to leave again once that adjustment is complete. We insert such intervals into our lives as a kind of restorative break. They are meant to refresh us when the steady sameness of daily routine has begun to dull and weaken us. But this dulling is not simple physical or mental fatigue; if it were, rest alone would cure it. The real issue is psychological: when life becomes too uniform, our sense of time fades. And because our awareness of time is bound up with our awareness of being alive, when one weakens, so does the other. We commonly think that interesting experiences make time pass quickly, while monotony makes it drag. That is only partly true. Monotony does make hours feel long and tedious. Yet over longer stretches it has the opposite effect: it compresses time. Large, uniform periods shrink in memory until they seem to vanish. By contrast, rich and varied days may fly by in the moment, but they give weight and substance to life as a whole, so that years filled with variety seem fuller and longer than empty ones that slip away unnoticed.
Although I expect May Silver to rally to 117.485 (daily, a=69.850 on dec 31, 2025) eventually, it looks like it will need to correct down to 69.245 first. That's the 'd' target of the rABC pattern shown, and the forecast of a further retracement is based on sellers' decisive penetration of the midpoint Hidden Pivot support (p=83.273) on the way down early last week. If the futures rally first to the green line (x=90.286), that would trigger a 'mechanical' short with a 97.305 stop-loss (just above the point 'c' high). That' implies about $35,000 of initial risk per contract, so the trade is recommended only for subscribers who can cut it down to no more than $750 theoretical with a 'camouflage' trigger.
Yet another punk Friday suggests that the longest bull market in history is running out of gas. Considering that the war with Iran is a mop-up operation at this point, and that global jihad has suffered an extraordinary setback, the stock market should be celebrating. Instead, the S&P mini-futures couldn't even muster the last dozen or so points to reach a 6911.50 rally target I'd considered a lock-up. The futures could have returned to the green line (x=6766.94) for a running start and another try; instead, they kept falling, canceling an ostensibly bullish pattern with a dip beneath its point 'c' low at 6718.75, just ahead of the opening bell. To complete this picture of feebleness, buyers went nowhere on Friday, even unburdened of bulls who were stopped out with the gratuitous dip beneath 6718.75. Now all DaBoyz can do is wait for "news" conducive to a short squeeze, which, as I never tire of reminding you, is where nearly all of the serious buying power comes from in bull markets. But if a decisive victory against the chief agent of evil in this world is not enough to spark such a rally, then what is? Instead, the focus of the hacks who invent the news is on the disruption of oil markets. It has been years since Wall Street much cared about events in the real world, much less a mostly imagined problem with oil shipments in the Persian Gulf (as evidenced by Israel's resumption of commercial air flights.) The Masters of the Universe should be looking past this, toward the resumption of business as usual. And yet, their dim lackeys in the news media seem crestfallen over Iran's impending defeat. (Tune to CNN for 30 minutes if you don't believe this.) Something is wrong with this picture, and
[Your editor is taking a busman's holiday in San Francisco. Although trading touts will update as usual and I'll be active in the chat room, this commentary and the next come from the archive. You can judge for yourself whether they were sufficiently on-target to still be relevant. RA] Stocks looked leaden as the week ended, adding to the impression that the aging bull market is topping. The Dow tacked on a perfunctory 104 points, or 0.22%, and it wasn't pretty. There was little life in the lunatic sector (aka 'the Magnificent Seven'), which until recently could be relied on to celebrate its wildest flights of fantasy on Fridays. The biggest winner in the bunch was META, which rose 1.80% on news that Zuckerberg is having second thoughts about his all-in bet on a metaverse. If you're unfamiliar with the term, it refers to a virtual world in which users interact online through avatars. Zuckerberg evidently thought there were hundreds of millions of us, if not billions, eager to escape the pain and drudgery of day-to-day life. He was so certain about this that he changed the name of his company in 2021 from Facebook to Meta. But after sinking $70 billion into the concept, there has been precious little payback. Even more troubling to investors is that there are no obvious ways to make back what has been spent already, nor to recoup any further sums Meta might pour into the idea. Counting on Investors' Stupidity To cover up this boo-boo, and to avoid being thought clueless, Zuckerberg did what any muckety-muck CEO in the digital world would have done: a twisting somersault onto the AI bandwagon. "AI is the most important technology we are working on," he said, evidently hoping investors have forgotten that he spent the last
Rates on the 10-Year Note came within a hair on Friday of lows not seen since October. My suggestion is to enjoy it while it lasts, since the intraday bottom closely coincided with a Hidden Pivot target at 3.952%. The actual low was 3.956%, which was near enough to consider the target fulfilled. Alternatively, if the downtrend continues on Monday, breaching not just the target but October's 3.976% bottom, be ready for more slippage to 3.917%, a voodoo number worth bottom-fishing with as tight a stop-loss as you're comfortable with. _______ UPDATE (Mar 7): It looks like the prediction of an important low hit a bullseye, since this vehicle has since trampolined as high as 4.19% after bottoming a split hair from the 3.952 target. Here's the chart. _____ UPDATE (April 3): And now rates have rebounded to as high as 4.49%. Too bad the talking heads on Bloomberg and MSNBC, the Fed board of governors and the Wall Street Journal editorialists were unaware of the potentially major turn-up when my forecast caught its exact low, since precisely accurate technical forecasts are unknown in their world of bullshit metadata.
'Mechanical ' sell signals have a great track record for producing profits, but the waiting time lately has become tortuous. This could be because the white-shoe racketeers who rig the markets have lacked sufficient "news," good or bad, to trigger the wild swings needed to steal from panicky retail investors. Trump's bloviations have lost their punch, and Fed-watching has devolved into something like Kremlinology, too arcane to parse. Be that as it may, the futures remain on-target for a further fall to at least 6720.00. I canceled a corresponding short in QQQ Friday on the hunch that it would take hours to grind out a relatively small profit. That is what happened, and don't be surprised if Monday and the week ahead offer more of the same. The big moves have come early in the week lately, presumably because it takes a few days for lack of mass indecision and uncertainty to slip into its by-now-familiar rut. _______ UPDATE (Feb 3, 3:59 pm.): Do you see the 6720.00 target boldfaced above? It not only correctly and confidently predicted the trend and the nasty, 155-point plunge that followed, it also caught the low of the dive within 1.75 points. Only two subscribers appear to have noticed any of this, and one of them, a novice with an extremely erratic track record, caught a profitable ride worth $3000 from within a hair of the low. If you got long there yourself and rode it to the top, the trade would have produced an intraday gain of $6500 per contract. _______ UPDATE (Mar 5) Bears turned gutless after pounding the futures overnight. The resulting short-squeeze looked like it would top at 6911.50 to end yet another week of gratuitous spasms.
Bottom-fishing at the 257.71 target of this pattern looks so promising that I hate to queer its magic with this semi-public ad. The target looks likely to be reached because the stock never poked above p=266.91 after first penetrating it on the way down. Still, the failure to bounce precisely from the secondary Hidden Pivot (p2=262.31) is more than a little mystifying, since it is highly unlikely the support was front-run. (I've masked two coordinates for proprietary reasons). I would call this a back-up-the-truck trade if the target had been disseminated and triggered intraday. As things stand, however, you'll need to use small-pattern 'camo' to get aboard with risk held to a practical minimum. _______ UPDATE (Mar 5): Sunday's rickisms in this space set a new world record for the number of forehead-slapping errors your editor has committed in a single tout. The 257.71 target boldfaced in the original tout, above, did indeed nail a tradeable low with the eye-popping precision you have come to expect from Rick's Picks. The trouble is, I used MSFT in the header, but the tout pertained to AAPL. Now here's where the rickisms grew so thick that some of you may have feared your editor had imbibed a bad dose of LSD; for in fact, the chart included with the tout showed neither Microsoft nor AAPL, but April Gold. Fortunately, or perhaps not, there seems to be only one subscriber who remotely cares about Microsoft, and it is was hhis comment in the chat room about my "janky" tout that prompted this update. To make amends, I've replaced the gold chart with one of MSFT so that you can see that things worked out almost precisely according to the forecast. Because the alert subscriber is one of the most experienced traders who frequents the
Despite Gold's labored price action near the midpoint Hidden Pivot (p=4950.00), it looks like a certain bet to reach the d target at 5476.70, about 3.4% above Friday's settlement price. Since it delivered a perfect, effortless trade at the green line a month ago, there is a good chance that a tradeable top will occur at d. I am not recommending a short there, however, unless you have made money on the way up. You should also be aware that if buyers blow past the target, the next logical objective would be 5732.00, a Hidden Pivot resistance that is likely to show more stopping power than the lower one. ________ UPDATE (Mar 1, 10:49 p.m.): Tonight's breakaway gap has raised the short-term minimum target to 5510.40, a Hidden Pivot with the potential to reverse the rally for a little while. The other rally targets remain viable. _______ UPDATE (Mar 7): The 5510.40 Hidden Pivot remains viable as a minimum upside objective for the near term, but you can add another at 5732.00 if buyers easily push past it. This chart shows the provenance of the target.
