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.

October 15th, 2023 | Be Among the First to Panic

Rick's Picks - Finally, a rally in gold that looks capable of leaving the $2000 barrier in the dust! This one is being pushed not only by the threat of escalated conflict in the Middle East, but by the dawning realization that a strong dollar and rising interest rates are about to trigger a crisis for the world’s […]

HoweStreet.com Radio - US Real Estate, Natural Gas, Shipping Costs

Rick's Picks - The massive terrorist attack by Hamas on Israel over the weekend will unsettle the geopolitical world for the foreseeable future. The economic implications are potentially too grave to be treated merely as a tradeable event; investors should instead be thinking about safeguarding capital. Will the price of crude spike to $117 or higher, as predicted […]

Rick's Picks - Price action last week in the charts of three bellwethers suggests that this year’s ‘October surprise’ could arrive right on schedule and that it could be a doozy.  The first shows the dollar’s so-far shallow correction off a minor Hidden Pivot rally target. This portends yet more strength, threatening to turn Powell’s tightening regime into […]

HoweStreet.com Radio - Uranium gaining because wind and solar power are flops

Rick's Picks - The bullish gap on the chart holds ominous implications for the global economy, since it removes almost all doubt that interest rates on U.S. Treasury Bonds are headed significantly higher. The rally looks nearly certain to reach 4.81%, the target of the pattern shown.  The red line through which the gap occurred last Thursday is a […]

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 […]

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. […]

HoweStreet.com Radio - Your next insurance bill may be quite a shock

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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%, […]

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 […]

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

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

HoweStreet.com Radio - AI not the big deal it’s made out to be

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 […]

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 […]
« Previous PageNext Page »