Wall Street evidently sees the war as little more than an annoyance, something to be gotten over as quickly as possible so that the monkeys who are paid to throw Other People's Money at stocks can get back to business as usual. Their main impediment at the moment is Trump-deranged media coverage that is rooting so hard against Trump that they are practically cheering on Iran. Bloomberg, the New York Times and the Washington Post et al. could almost make you believe that Iran, without a Navy, can mine the Strait of Hormuz under the watchful eye of the most sophisticated minesweeper fleet on the planet. In the meantime, the news media's relentless barrage of discouragements has made it extremely difficult for the chimps and prop desk whizzes to trigger off the kind of short-squeeze leaps that could push the broad averages to new record highs in mere days. And so they continue to bide their time, waiting for cheerier headlines. Although the Dow, Nasdaq and the S&Ps have shown little life this year, neither have they shown much weakness. In any event, investors are certain to remain obsessed with oil prices until quotes recede from the $100 threshold, and until the talking heads concede that the current price dislocations are not likely to be permanent. In the meantime, this is no bear market, just a perpetual-motion money machine waiting to lurch wildly back into gear. Oh, right, a price target: The futures look southbound most immediately for 6452.75, and a rally to the green line (x=6752.19) would trigger a 'mechanical' short, stop 6852.25. It is recommended only to subscribers who know how to cut the $5000 risk per contract to $250 or less, and it is most definitely NOT recommended to Nick. Here's a link to my latest rant
I've restored MSFT to the list because it could prove to be analytically useful. No bear market is possible as long as this stock is at least holding its own. It triggered a plain-jane 'mechanical' buy when it fell to the green line last month (x=407.04) after having failed to achieve a bull-market target at D=593.79 by a country mile. The implication is that you are likely to make money buying the stock here with a stop-loss just beneath the point C low at 345.79. I cannot guarantee that the implied rally will reach D, but it is a better bet to deliver a one-level move to p than to slip beneath C first.
April Gold will trigger a mechanical buy when (not if) it falls to the green line (x=4838.60). The trade is predicated on a 6084.80 target that looks like a 75% shot to be reached. I proffer this information not to get you salivating, but rather to clarify the picture at a time when price action has been lackluster and forecasts are all over the lot. The trade rates an '8.1', which means my confidence is quite high. Since the initial risk would be $41,490 per contract, I am recommending the trade only to subscribers who are quite proficient with 'camo' entry triggers, no exceptions.
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.
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
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 (March 15): And now rates have rebounded to as high as 4.29%. 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
