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Rick Ackerman

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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 - The portfolio managers who rig the markets appear to be losing their touch. Usually, they are able to short-squeeze stocks in the ‘lunatic sector’ — our label for the egregiously mis-named ‘Magnificent Seven’ — when earnings are announced after the close.  This quasi-criminal manipulation can add hundreds of billions of dollars to the world’s ‘wealth […]

HoweStreet.com Radio - The manipulation of precious metal prices losing its grip

April 14th, 2024 | Springtime for Bonds?

Rick's Picks -   The devastating bear market in Treasury paper since 2020 may be nearing an end. I was pessimistic about this myself when TLT, an exchange-traded fund, that tracks the long bond, broke down last week. But a bigger picture saw this as occurring in the context of a market that may have bottomed last October. […]

Rick's Picks - [Many readers of these weekly commentaries may not be aware that the focus of Rick’s Picks each day is on timely trading ideas. Below is chat room banter for a typical ‘freaky Friday’. The discussion includes several trades that were posted ahead of actionable opportunities in a few stocks, including McDonald’s, Tesla and Amazon. All the links […]

HoweStreet.com Radio - US Economy great for billionaires, not so much for everyone else

March 31st, 2024 | Why We Fail to Fix Things

Rick's Picks - [My colleague Charles Hugh Smith is a true outside-the-box thinker who tackles big questions with intellectual rigor and bold imagination. In the commentary below, he explains why neither our political system nor technological wizardry have been able to solve problems that threaten to topple the global economy and destroy our quality of life.  You can support excellence […]

Rick's Picks -   The Fed’s main job supposedly is to manage our expectations, but have Powell & Co. painted themselves into a corner? At the moment, it would appear that investors have no clue what to expect. That wouldn’t necessarily be a bad thing, except that their default mode has been to push stocks with multitrillion dollar […]

HoweStreet.com Radio - Is the party for Gold and Silver expected to continue?

March 17th, 2024 | Something’s Got to Give

Rick's Picks - For nearly a year, I’ve promoted the idea that the post-covid bull rampage would end when Microsoft shares hit $430. They effectively achieved that benchmark on Friday with a pre-dawn print at 428.95 that gave way to a $16 plunge. If this was not THE top, it certainly felt like A top, and a potentially […]

Rick's Picks - Bitcoin mania looks likely to blow itself out at somewhat higher levels. The bitcoin ETF chart above suggests buyers will encounter significant resistance at 64.95, a Hidden Pivot target that lies 5% above Friday’s closing price. If this impediment gives way easily or is exceeded for two consecutive weeks on a closing basis, however, you […]

HoweStreet.com Radio - Carrington Effect

March 3rd, 2024 | The Dregs Take Flight

Rick's Picks -   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. […]

Rick's Picks - 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. […]

HoweStreet.com Radio - Mandated government decisions usually the wrong decision

February 18th, 2024 | The Coming Crash of Bigness

Rick's Picks - [Globalism has peaked, says my colleague James Howard Kunstler, and with it a trend toward corporate bigness that has all but extinguished quality and vitality from the marketplace.  Bloated corporatism is about to come crashing down, he says, in a process of creative destruction that will allow us to rescale the economy so that it better […]

February 11th, 2024 | Even Bulls Are Getting Nervous

Rick's Picks - However high stocks climb, there will always be an earnest, bespectacled egghead on Wall Street ready to tell us why shares are likely to keep on rising. Here’s Yung-Yu Ma, chief Investment officer for a firm called BMO Wealth Management and a finance professor at Lehigh University: “A better economy, healthy profits and lower inflation,” […]

February 8th, 2024 | Wall of Worry Or Just Hype?

HoweStreet.com Radio - A myth billions are waiting to be invested?

Rick's Picks - Here are a couple of headlines concerning the economy that appeared atop Bloomberg’s front page on the same day last week. Taken together, they could make one’s head spin. First the happy news: IMF Lifts World GDP Outlook on U.S. Strength. But here’s the article just beneath: UPS to Cut 12,000 Jobs. A case of schizophrenia on the […]

Rick's Picks - [This week’s commentary was written by David Isham, a longtime Rick’s Picks subscribers from Northern California who has been investing in bullion since he was in grade school four decades ago. RA ] Although gold appears to have broken out of a triple top and recently hit fresh all-time highs at $2152, the gold miners are trading at the […]

HoweStreet.com Radio - The key indicator a major market correction is about to happen

Rick's Picks - When forecasting stock prices, it helps to view the market as a crazed creature driven by fear, greed, and most of all, stupidity. Of course, everyone but the “theme”-obsessed chimpanzees who purport to manage your money understands that the stock market’s heedless ascent into horrifying news is rock-bottom stupid.  In this case, the very bad […]

Rick's Picks - Reader Scott Baker took issue last week with my unsettling prediction of a deflationary bust. The mountain of debts that I believe will cause this is really no big deal, says Baker. He quotes economist Michael Hudson to back him up: “Debts that can’t be repaid, won’t be.” That certainly doesn’t sound very menacing. So […]

January 12th, 2024 | Is AI Over Blown?

HoweStreet.com Radio - Microsoft passes Apple as world’s biggest company

Rick's Picks - The stock market is so pumped with hubris, lies and delusions that I’m beginning to doubt whether the bull market will see Microsoft rally to $430 before everything comes crashing down. I’ve been using MSFT as a bellwether because it has been the strongest megacap stock in the world for the last four years, and […]

December 31st, 2023 | Can We Repeat 2023?

Rick's Picks - In these way-too-interesting times, there aren’t many publications that would trumpet a New Year’s Eve headline like the one above. It topped the front page of the South Florida Sun Sentinel, however, a tribute to the Sunshine State’s winning performance on the playing field. Two college basketball teams, University of Miami and Florida American University, made […]
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