Commentary for the Week of March 8

A few consecutive days of hard selling does not a bear market make, but it’s heartening to see that stocks are still capable of deferring to reality – in this case, weakening corporate earnings. For what it’s worth, the sharp decline has produced the first bearish “impulse leg” that we’ve seen on the S&P 500’s daily chart since last November. This triggered a negative warning according to our proprietary Hidden Pivot Method of analysis. Although the weakness does not necessarily portend the onset of a major bear market, odds of this will increase if, for one, the E-Mini S&Ps smash the key low at 1332.50 recorded on March 6. This is shown in the chart below. So why the selloff?  The headline on a commentary featured here earlier this week may explain it: Pumped Stocks Have Yet to Glimpse a GDP Slowdown.  Perhaps now they have, and investors with the foresight to have trimmed their sails should be feeling good about it.  Our own portfolio, such as it is, contains a short position in the QQQs – specifically, May 68 puts that were recommended for purchase a couple of weeks ago before the underlying index topped pennies from a 68.65 Hidden Pivot target. We used a conservative basis of 1.56 for the puts after subscribers confirmed having bought them for as little as 1.48. But with yesterday’s nasty selloff the options fetched as much as 2.80 apiece, allowing us to take a partial profit that reduced the cost basis of the puts we still hold to nothing.  Incidentally, that’s the goal of nearly all options plays recommended in Rick’s Picks – to work into a position that has no risk but upside potential sufficient to at least cover the cost of a year's subscription to the service. Win a $106

A story last week in the Wall Street Journal provided a fascinating glimpse into the world of high-speed, or “algo,” trading.  Who knew there was something called a “Hide Not Slide” order lurking in the murky shadows of  electronic trading?  Although this particular type of transaction might be difficult for the layman to understand, suffice it to say that it electronically hides or exposes bids and offers as needed with the skill of a three-card Monte hustler. The regulators supposedly are looking into algo trading because they suspect it might enable some traders to take unfair advantage of others. That would be putting it charitably – so much so that it is predictable that the SEC will detect a stench wherever they poke their noses, since it'll be like sniffing out political corruption in Chicago during the Roaring Twenties. In the meantime, the Journal’s report on the probe in its early stages turned up stories that verged on the lurid, including one about a firm that advertised itself as a haven for big investors worried about getting picked off by algo traders. Turns out the firm, Pipeline Trading Systems, had an algo operation of its own called Milstream. More than being merely suspicious about the way today’s electronic markets work is the BBC’s Max Keiser, a world-class muckraker who can smell financial scat a mile away.  In an interview we did with Max on Monday that will be linked here later this week, the discussion concerned some of the ways in which technological wizardry has helped tilt the playing field in favor of the trading world’s “one percent” elite. It may also turn out to have destabilized the markets so that a global flash crash is possible. We said as much in a recent commentary, and that is what drew

Stocks were struggling to get airborne late Sunday night after dive-bombing the tarmac Friday on news that the U.S economy had created a measly 120,000 jobs last month. Index futures traded just briefly on Good Friday before electronic markets closed at 9:15 a.m. for the holiday, but that was long enough for DaBoyz to take stocks down to fire-sale levels on near-zero volume. The E-Mini Dow futures plummeted 120 points in less than two minutes, setting the glum tone when trading resumed Sunday evening. However, our hunch is that shares will not go much lower on the opening, since the dirtballs who work the night shift are so good at shaking down the rubes on ostensibly bad news.  We say “ostensibly” because, for every trader who was disappointed that the alleged economic recovery appears to be losing steam, there were undoubtedly others who saw a new excuse for yet more Fed easing. A cynical calculation, to be sure, since everyone understands by now that even though the central banks have been running wide open for years, it is not benefiting employment, only stocks. Not that Wall Street cares.  Who needs jobs when it’s possible to promote runaway asset inflation with less effort and at a fraction of the cost?  Granted, that’s not the way Mr. Obama and his supporters on Capitol Hill would prefer it, since higher share prices alone are unlikely to fool voters come November. But for the time being, a rampaging stock market still holds the promise of reviving job creation and perhaps even of causing home prices to start recovering. We see neither happening, implying that the stock market could be on shaky ground. For even as Q1 earnings estimates have come down, down, down, the broad averages have barely paused for breath since late November.

Gold came down hard for a second straight day yesterday, but for all the wrong reasons. That’s why Rick’s Picks subscribers were ready to seize the opportunity with distress bids in two popular gold mining vehicles. One of them, GDX, the Gold Miners ETF, fell to within 14 cents of a 46.15 target that had been disseminated to subscribers a month ago when the price was in the high $50s.  So far, the recommendation is looking like a winner: by day’s end, with GDX settled at 46.71, the paper position was 68 cents in-the-black. The other recommendation involved GDXJ, an ETF comprised of smaller mining companies. This vehicle plummeted yesterday to a 22.74 target that had been promoted to our subscribers as a “back-up-the-truck” number when the stock was trading closer to $25. And although GDXJ fell yesterday a bit lower than we’d forecast, hitting 22.39 intraday, the bounce into day’s end brought it back to a high of 22.85 and a settlement just two cents below that.  Give it a little rest overnight, and we expect GDXJ to bolt from the gate on Thursday, the last trading day of this holiday-shortened week. Even so, we’ve instructed traders to place protective stops not far below where they got long in order to minimize exposure if GDX and GDXJ relapse to new lows. [Want to get in on our next trade via a real-time e-mail alert? Click here for a free trial subscription to Rick’s Picks that will give you that and much more, including access to our 24/7 chat rooms.] So what about our assertion that bullion and mining shares fell for all of the wrong reasons? The selloff began on Tuesday when minutes from the last Fed meeting were released. Apparently, the minutes contained no explicit word that the

It was while under the influence of LSD that a childhood friend of ours decided to end a promising career as a commodity trader.  He was buying and selling pork belly contracts at the time but dropped acid one day hoping to gain valuable insights into the markets -- insights that presumably lay beyond the grasp of rational thinking.  Chuck had insights all right, but not the kind he’d expected.  Instead of having potentially profitable spreads, combos, strips and straddles leap out at him from his trading monitor, his febrile mind was overwhelmed by images of the slaughterhouse -- of 400-pound sows dripping blood from a conveyor belt. The experience was cathartic enough that his next job, announcing professional basketball games, was as far from the feedlots and butcheries as he could get. We mention this because market-watching has become all-too-abstracted for us lately as well. Ponder the whys and wherefores of the stock market for too long and you begin to believe that investors are being led, one rally at a time, to the slaughterhouse.  Or so it would seem. Europe’s bailout, for one, is a hoax that can only end badly for us all. And the torrent of lies that have kept the U.S. out of statistical recession are so egregious that a bust of 1929 proportions could occur literally overnight and at any time.  As we know, the mindless herd can have epiphanies just like individuals. Except that they are called panics. And yet, stocks continue to ratchet higher most of the time, pausing only long enough to allow sector rotation and the orderly flow of money in and out of the flavor-of-the-week asset class. We've Had Our Warning Someone in the Rick’s Picks forum described this yesterday as musical chairs, and we would agree. The remark

With last week's rally, the broad averages turned in their best first-quarter performance ever. Supposedly, it was upbeat data on consumer spending that helped push the rally into the record books. But if consumers are actually starting to loosen up – using credit, of course, since household incomes have been stagnant --  the evidence is nowhere to be seen. The nation’s retail landscape in fact remains blighted with boarded up stores and gangrenous malls. Last week, Best Buy became a candidate for the death-watch list with the announcement that it plans to close 50 stores and lay off 400 workers as part of a plan to save $800 million in recurring costs. The consumer electronics giant also plans to move away from the big-box format that helped put so many competitors out of business. Now Best Buy is itself the victim of an even bigger player, Amazon, which, with free shipping and no sales tax, can meet or beat any price Best Buy can offer.  How are you going to compete with that?  Answer: You can’t. And that means that the closing of 50 of Best Buy’s 1100 stores could be the beginning of the end, just as it was for Borders and Blockbuster when they began to shrink to compete more efficiently with, respectively, Amazon and Netflix. Best Buy’s retrenchment will not be welcome news for commercial real estate developers, who have yet to recover from an unending stream of big-box closures, including Comp USA, Borders, The Great Indoors, Circuit City and Linens ‘n Things, to name some of the more recent ones. Their bankruptcies have glutted the market with more space than could be absorbed in a decade -- and that’s assuming there are new businesses ready to move in that can pay the rent on showrooms the

You gotta give DaBoyz credit for turning stocks around yesterday, since buyers appeared to have taken the day off. Nor was there much bullish energy as the day wore on – only the nervous drum beat of short-covering ahead of the final trading day of Q1.  It was all window dressing, to be sure, and although the Dow Industrials ended the day 20 points higher, the modest gain belied the dark magic that eventually spirited the blue chip average into positive territory.  After being down as much as 93 points early in the session, the Indoos began to inch their way higher around noon.  Of course, most of the gains came during the final hour, as is so often the case. Bears apparently had second thoughts about trusting Friday to be mellow, especially a Friday coinciding with the end of a fiscal quarter. With earnings growth apparently slowing down, will the broad averages continue to waft higher in the weeks ahead?  Perhaps. Whatever your view on the economy, keep in mind that there is no story, even weakening earnings, that cannot be spun bullishly. The optimists would interpret this as meaning companies have hit a wall on profit margins and will soon start hiring to keep up with sales. A darker view would hold that stagnant household incomes and still-falling home prices are about to smother the consumption side of growth. Yes, we too have noticed that credit card teaser rates are back down to 0.0%, sometimes with no origination fee. But the asset growth on which this seductive scam has always thrived is simply not there. ‘Time for Defense’ Meanwhile, not everyone thinks that higher stock prices are baked in the cake for Q2.  “Traders and investors should use Friday, March 30, to get defensive,” read an e-mail we

A key goal of Rick’s Picks is to offer trade set-ups that risk relatively little even when we are wrong.  This is of particular importance because our subscribers tend to be overly bearish on stocks and overly bullish on gold. Prices for the latter have been slipping for a month, and although that might discourage fair-weather buyers, it has only made our gold bugs more eager to try bottom-fishing with each new selloff. And with stock averages now entering their fourth consecutive year of stupidly rising prices, Rick’s Picks subscribers have been keener than ever to short that diabolically elusive Mother of All Tops. We tried this for the umpteenth time yesterday, buying put options just as the QQQs were topping pennies from where expected. We’ll get to that trade in a moment.  But first, let’s talk about the trade in Comex Gold, since it illustrates how one can swim against the tide, buying the dips and dives in bullion without getting hurt even when the selling turns ugly, as it all too often does. We’d put out a buy recommendation in gold futures Tuesday night that was based on some precise “Hidden Pivot” correction targets in the Comex April and June contracts.  Ordinarily, we  tell subscribers to initiate such trades using the “camouflage” entry technique they've learned at the monthly Hidden Pivot Webinar. [Click here for details and a $50 discount for the April class.] This time, however, the bearish targets looked so appealing that we sanctioned dispensing with “camouflage” and simply buying either the April or June gold contract with a five-tick stop-loss. This entailed, in the case of the April, placing a bid two ticks above a 1669.90 Hidden Pivot target and using a stop-loss a hair below it, at 1669.60.  In the actual event, the micro-tight

[The following is a personal favorite that I re-publish from time to time. I wrote it more than ten years ago for the Sunday San Francisco Examiner, but the theme is still relevant for investors who believe there's an Easy Street. RA] Talk about a sure thing! Here was the kind of inside information that one imagined tumbled from heaven into the ears of the anointed. It concerned not the stock market - we'll get to that part soon - but a pacer named Happy Yankee A that was running in the seventh race at Roosevelt Raceway outside of Philadelphia one evening nearly four decades ago. According to my source, this horse was not merely a strong bet to win, he was an absolute lock, lead-pipe cinch. This horse absolutely could not lose. What's more, the Yankster had looked so tired the last few times out that he would probably go off at fat odds. My tipster was Willie D, a storied acquaintance and unusually gifted confidence man who could loosen a mark's checkbook the way a starfish pries open a clam. Here he was on the phone one Saturday morning - probably to everyone he owed - trying to burnish his karma with an offer of timely investment advice. One seldom saw or heard from Willie D around breakfast time, since that was when he usually went to bed. But that day he had stayed awake, he said, to get the word out. He wanted to give his pals enough time to borrow, beg or steal as much cash as they could by post time, the better to wager on the seventh race. If word of Happy Yankee A's expected trip to the winner's circle had come from anyone else, I might have shrugged it off. After all, how