ALWAYS CONSULT YOUR INVESTMENT PROFESSIONAL BEFORE MAKING ANY INVESTMENT DECISION
Rick Ackerman
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.
September 17th, 2023 | A Stroll Down Disinflation Lane
Rick's Picks - [Last week’s commentary on the gathering economic storm elicited a light-hearted reminiscence from our friend Richard Charles of Alpine Capital. You’ll find his recollection of some notable deflationists enlightening, and there’s also a new word — screwflation — he has coined to describe a phenomenon that has yet to gain traction with eggheads at some of […]
September 10th, 2023 | Who Will Buy Baby Boomers’ McMansions?
Rick's Picks - Can the Wall Street Journal‘s headline writers save America’s juiced-up economy from going bust? They are certainly trying. Check out their lede in Friday’s editions: The Fall in Home Prices May Already Be Over. Fancy that! With mortgage rates headed toward 8%, many readers must have done a double-take when they read this seeming howler. Your editor […]
September 4th, 2023 | Some Scary Shit
Rick's Picks - I let it all hang out in the interview I did Friday with USAWatchdog‘s Greg Hunter. Do I actually believe the U.S. economy is headed into a condition of barter? Yes, I do. It will be that bad. And global. Americans in particular will face a long period of severe hardship when these boom times end. […]
August 31st, 2023 | Stock Markets Ripe for an October “Surprise”
HoweStreet.com Radio - Your next insurance bill may be quite a shock
August 27th, 2023 | ‘AI’ Just Another Wall Street Scam
Rick's Picks - A handful of tech moguls already control the global flow of information, but their influence over our lives will only expand and deepen if Congress doesn’t do something soon to pry their greedy hands from the ultimate fruits of AI development. I say this while recognizing the irony of casting our elected representatives as the […]
August 20th, 2023 | Thoughts on Rent, the Fed, and Bonds
Rick's Picks - [The following was sent out to clients in late July by my friend Doug Behnfield, a wealth manager and senior vice president at Morgan Stanley Wealth Management in Boulder, CO. Long-time followers of Rick’s Picks will be familiar with Doug’s work, since his thoughts have appeared here many times. I have always considered him not only one of […]
August 17th, 2023 | Could a 27% Drop Happen to Some Stock Markets?
HoweStreet.com Radio - Why crude remains a solid investment
August 13th, 2023 | T-Bond Plunge Ahead?
Rick's Picks - Is Mr. Market about to deliver the coup de grace to bond bulls? It certainly appears that way. They’ve been getting schmeissed regularly since a frightening few days back in March 2020. At the time, investors were struggling to decide how covid would affect their financial lives. The wild gyrations near the top, followed by the subsequent collapse of […]
August 6th, 2023 | AAPL Takes the Lead…Lower
Rick's Picks - Last week’s commentary said the first big correction of 2023 had a ways to go, and that is still the case. If there were any doubts about this, Apple’s swan dive Thursday on punk Q2 earnings released after the close should have dispelled them. The most valuable stock in the world fell by nearly 5%, […]
July 30th, 2023 | First Big Correction of 2023 Has a Ways to Go
Rick's Picks - My ‘Chipotle indicator’ suggests that CMG, along with other high-fliers and the broad averages, could fall by at least 27% from recent highs before the bull market resumes later this summer. We last visited the burrito vendor’s chart in early May, just after a short-squeeze powered by feverish buying speared the red line, a ‘midpoint […]
July 23rd, 2023 | A Few Trillion Here, a Few Trillion There…
Rick's Picks - Last week’s commentary predicted that rates on the Ten-Year Note, currently around 3.8%, will hit a minimum 5.5% before inflation lurches into reverse and the U.S. begins a hellish descent into a full-blown debt deflation. The following, insightful response came from our friend Richard Charles at Alpine Capital: Well done, Rick, for highlighting the crux of markets […]
July 20th, 2023 | Inflation Just Pausing?
HoweStreet.com Radio - When the stock markets might top
July 16th, 2023 | 5.5% Rate on T-Bonds Coming, but Then What?
Rick's Picks - Jim Grant, the financial word’s adult in the room, says the bear market in Treasury bonds could last for decades. Do the long-term charts bear him out? The one reproduced above suggests that it’s at least possible that we are in the early stages of such a move. Most immediately, the chart projects a further […]
July 9th, 2023 | Few Big Winners in the Hard Times Ahead
Rick's Picks - Will the rich and powerful own everything when the global financial system collapses from too much debt? Supposedly, “they” have been plotting and preparing for this all along — even getting a new money system ready to make the takeover complete. But this theory makes no more sense than the one that puts the same evil geniuses […]
July 2nd, 2023 | What to Expect After an Endless ‘Fourth’
Rick's Picks - This promises to be the longest holiday ever celebrated in the U.S., eclipsing even the eight-day festival holidays that frequently pop up on the Jewish calendar. By the time you read this, the Independence Day celebration will be in its unofficial fourth day, having begun in spirit with a pronounced slowdown in the stock market […]
June 25th, 2023 | We’ll Look Back Fondly on Inflation
Rick's Picks - Inflation is being crushed from the system by vastly larger forces of deflation that have been lurking for decades. Although we might have expected the trillions in funny money that were force-fed into the U.S. economy during the covid era to have a longer-lasting effect on prices, inflation never had much of a chance. With […]
June 22nd, 2023 | Major Cities in a Death Spiral
HoweStreet.com Radio - AI not the big deal it’s made out to be
June 18th, 2023 | Frustrated Bear? Temporary Relief Is on the Way
Rick's Picks - When will the rampaging bull run out of steam? A good question, considering how Wall Street has been flouting a slew of good reasons for the broad averages to be at multiyear lows rather than revving up for a shot at new record highs. Two destructive juggernauts in particular are bearing down on the economy […]
June 11th, 2023 | How Wall Street Thrives on Meaningless Data
Rick's Picks - The Biden Administration can count on Wall Street to celebrate meaningless economic data and bogus GDP growth with steep rallies, even as the visible economy continues to implode. It will become increasingly difficult to ignore signs of impending collapse, however, as anyone who lives in San Francisco could tell you. The city’s growing wretchedness is […]
June 8th, 2023 | US Economic Stats Don’t Match Actual Economy
HoweStreet.com Radio - AI has to cure a lot of its stumbling blocks
June 4th, 2023 | $AAPL – Apple Computer (Last:180.95)
Rick's Picks - The post-covid bull market begun in the final quarter of 2020 is running out of room, at least on the daily chart. The 184,86 target shown, a Hidden Pivot resistance, is not the highest that can be projected, but it still looks capable of restraining the charge, if only for a short while. Sliding ‘A’ down […]
May 28th, 2023 | And Now Microsoft Leads the Stampede!
Rick's Picks - Microsoft’s bullish rampage last week added to already strong evidence that the stock market is headed to new records highs. The shares of the software leviathan’s shares not only jackhammered through granite resistance in the form of the midpoint ‘Hidden Pivot’ shown in the chart, they ended the week decisively above it. This technical telltale […]
May 21st, 2023 | Did the Bear Rally Top on Friday?
Rick's Picks - Maybe. Yeah, right. A headline here just two weeks ago implied that stocks were about to go bananas: Why a Permabear Is Certain We’re Going Much Higher. Hubris aside, this was based on the very bullish chart of just one stock, Chipotle (CMG). It had just crossed the $2,000 threshold and appeared — still appears — […]
May 14th, 2023 | Bond Bulls Seemed Just as Crazy in 1981
Rick's Picks - [Editor’s note: The following commentary draws parallels between today’s bond market environment and the last great bear market in bonds, which bottomed in 1981. It went out last month to clients of my friend Doug Behnfield, a financial advisor and senior vice president at Morgan Stanley Wealth Management in Boulder. Long-time followers of Rick’s Picks will be familiar with […]
May 11th, 2023 | Stock Markets vs. Economic Data
HoweStreet.com Radio - Government manipulated stats vs. reality