Howestreet.com - the source for market opinions

ALWAYS CONSULT YOUR INVESTMENT PROFESSIONAL BEFORE MAKING ANY INVESTMENT DECISION

Rick Ackerman

Guest's Website

Rick Ackerman is the editor of Rick’s Picks, an online service geared to traders of stocks, options, index futures and commodities. His detailed trading strategies have appeared since the early 1990s in Black Box Forecasts, a newsletter he founded that originally was geared to professional option traders. Barron’s once labeled him an “intrepid trader” in a headline that alluded to his key role in solving a notorious pill-tampering case. He received a $200,000 reward when a conviction resulted, and the story was retold on TV’s FBI: The Untold Story. His professional background includes 12 years as a market maker in the pits of the Pacific Coast Exchange, three as an investigator with renowned San Francisco private eye Hal Lipset, seven as a reporter and newspaper editor, three as a columnist for the Sunday San Francisco Examiner, and two decades as a contributor to publications ranging from Barron’s to The Antiquarian Bookman to Fleet Street Letter and Utne Reader.

Rick's Picks - Robot demonstrations are notorious for going comically awry. Seat Robby at a staged dinner and he will stab himself in the eye with a forkful of make-believe mashed potatoes. Have him put a butter dish back in the refrigerator and he’ll slam the door on his head. So what, then, are we to make of this […]

Rick's Picks - AI hubris has got itself in a bind, trapped between two conflicting stories, neither of which seems likely to end well. One story has the boys in the billionaire’s club throwing untold sums of money at a technology that seems increasingly unlikely to produce commensurate returns. The other story has been threatening whole sectors of […]

HoweStreet.com Radio - What the real scandal could be from the Epstein files

February 8th, 2026 | Time to Jump on Miners

Rick's Picks - [The following commentary was written by Steve Houck. He is a longtime investor in bullion and knows the markets well.  He is also a friend and former business partner.  RA ] Looking at the froth in silver, it became apparent it was time to rotate from overvalued to undervalued once again.  Selling precious-metal ETFs like SLV and AGQ […]

Rick's Picks - Pity the J-school rookies who are paid to explain why the stock market did what it did on a given day. On Thursday, Microsoft shares lost nearly a half-a-trillion dollars of value. But why? Bloomberg’s Evening Briefing called it a ‘rap on the knuckles’ for the company’s huge spending on AI projects that seem increasingly unlikely to […]

HoweStreet.com Radio - Why you should be wary of the term “tokenization”?

January 25th, 2026 | What Rough Beast?

Rick's Picks - If you can’t guess what commodity the chart shows, you must be living on Mars. It is in fact a long-term picture of silver, which went ballistic in December.  The price has doubled since, blowing out a $50 top that had stood since 1980. That price became a part of silver’s legend, since it is […]

Rick's Picks - Readers can be forgiven for wondering how long the ‘topping process’ I’ve alluded to over the last several months will drag on. As you will have long since concluded, no one can answer that question with confidence. For all that we supposed experts know, the bull market that began in 2009 could still be chugging […]

Rick's Picks - The Dow is poised to hit 50,000 this week, a milestone that would have seemed surreal when the blue chip average, plagued by covid, was bottoming near 18,000 six years ago. Although there can be little doubt that Trump helped kick stocks into high gear, one could argue that a powerfully bullish economic cycle made […]

January 4th, 2026 | So Much Is Riding on Silver!

Rick's Picks - The speculative frenzy in silver has provided welcome relief from AI claptrap, but will it last?  There are a hundred theories about why silver has come exuberantly to life after lagging gold for so long.   I’ve been puzzled myself, since my technical runes suggest that gold futures could make an important top at $5132, about […]

Rick's Picks - The widespread notion that a U.S. president can significantly influence the economy is mistaken. In observable fact, the broad cycles that bring us good times and bad, booms and busts, are vastly larger and more powerful than the presidency, too overwhelming to even affect, let alone command. Even the radical economic policies of Roosevelt’s New […]

December 18th, 2025 | Room for Silver to Climb Higher

HoweStreet.com Radio - Bitcoin on very shaky ground

Rick's Picks - Just one more push could exhaust a bull market that is coming up on its seventeenth year. Although that’s only about three dog years, it equates to about 120 human years.  In fact, no other bull market has lasted even remotely that long. The next-oldest, birthed at the low of the October 1987 Crash, was […]

Rick's Picks - 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 […]

November 30th, 2025 | Bear Sighting Was Premature

Rick's Picks - Like UFOs and Bigfoot, far more bear market sightings are imagined than real. I thought I’d spotted Papa Bear myself when Nvidia announced terrific earnings a couple of weeks ago, only to see their shares reverse and dive sharply after a deceptive spike higher. Was this the needle prick that burst the AI bubble? It […]

Rick's Picks - 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 […]

Rick's Picks - The ‘affordability’ issue percolated to the top of the news last week, but in a peculiar way. On the right, the debate was not about whether things in general are becoming less affordable for most Americans, as they unmistakably are, but whether the left has blown the issue far out of proportion to create a […]

Rick's Picks - [ My friend Doug Behnfield, a wealth manager and senior vice president at Morgan Stanley in Boulder, has contributed many commentaries to Rick’s Picks over the years. Below is the Q3 report he sent out to clients several weeks ago. Like many observers, he is troubled by the enormous concentration of investment capital in the AI space. Can the […]

HoweStreet.com Radio - Does Gold still have a positive outlook?

Rick's Picks - Years ago, I received death threats after writing in the San Francisco Examiner that Apple looked like it was about to go under.  That was in 1997, not long after Steve Jobs returned after a 12-year exile. Ironically, he was fired by the man he’d recruited in 1985 to run the show — cue the hisses and boos […]

Rick's Picks - Here’s a long-term trading opportunity that seems foolproof: short Apple shares and buy Tesla. Looking out over the next 10 years, this hedge position has the potential to produce outsize profits. How could Apple stumble badly enough to make it work? This is hardly inconceivable. Since Steve Jobs died 14 years ago, the company he […]

Rick's Picks -   The aging bull market smells like it’s in a topping process, although it could take a vicious head-fake or two to new highs to set the hook. Last week, I raised the possibility that shares had entered a vortex similar to the one that led to the 1929 Crash. A key similarity is that […]

Rick's Picks - Although in recent years October has not lived up to its reputation for scaring the pants off investors, we should take Friday’s punitive reversal seriously, since it could mark the start of a bear market that is arguably years overdue. Although we have grown accustomed to ‘freaky’ Fridays producing headline events now and then, there […]

October 9th, 2025 | How Much Higher Can Gold Go?

HoweStreet.com Radio - Is Bitcoin about to fizzle out?

September 14th, 2025 | ‘Guise’

Rick's Picks - I’m in San Francisco, taking a break from Florida’s insufferable summer heat, but also from my weekly commentaries. Writing regularly about the impending collapse of the stock market, Wall Street hubris and the fatally diseased economy had grown boring and depressing, and so, at least for the time being, I will be substituting more entertaining […]
Next Page »