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October 23, 2022 | Bear Market Kabuki
The seemingly strong rally that ended the week merely balanced out three days of bland weakness that had preceded it. In the S&P 500, the upthr ust steepened by the hour but ultimately failed to surpass any important prior peaks. The bear seems out to challenge bulls and bears alike with its obviousness. For one, […]
October 16, 2022 | October ‘Surprise’ Too Widely Advertised?
The spread between permabulls and permabears is at an extreme these days, even for October. This is the month when pessimists’ hopes are highest that an epic bear market will correct dangerous excesses that have been building up in the financial system for more than 50 years. A presumptive and welcome side effect of such […]
October 10, 2022 | What Rough Beast Cometh?
A pen-pal from the world of very high-tech inventions is a self-described ‘collapsitarian’. He wrote me recently to say he enjoys these weekly screeds for their relentlessly glum insightfulness. (For your information, he is 50% in cash, 25% in gold, and 25% short stocks.) Longtime readers will know that I seldom shout ‘The Sky Is […]
October 2, 2022 | Investment Advice from a Millionaire Barber
[Louie Piro, my barber when I lived in Mountain View CA shortly before Google arrived, became a multimillionaire with a simple investment strategy. I thought of him the other day when a Rick’s Picks subscriber wondered aloud in the chat room which investments are most likely to prosper in the recessionary hard times that Americans will soon […]
September 25, 2022 | Traders use Rick’s Picks to slash risk and boost their win rate:
Yields on 10-Year Treasury Notes, currently at 3.70%, are likely to hit 4.90% before they level off. It is hard to imagine an increase of that magnitude not disrupting the U.S. and global economies severely. America is already in a recession that looks all but certain to deepen before we hit bottom in a year […]
September 18, 2022 | Hope and Confidence Are on the Downslope Now
I’ve been reluctant to give permabears the all-clear because, being one myself, I’ve seen the bull market roar back from death a dozen times since 2009, turning my smug eulogies into embarrassments. The most punitive and outrageous of the rallies was the monster eruption begun in March 2020, when stocks exploded from the depths of […]
September 11, 2022 | Yet Another Short Squeeze Colors the World Rosy
Leave it to the pundits to tell us what the hell the stock market was celebrating on Friday. The FAANG stocks inspired an inexplicable rampage, just like in the good-old days, and everything seemed right with the world. In the view of those anointed by television producers to make sense of Wall Street’s non-stop nuttiness, […]
September 4, 2022 | As Apple Goes, So Goes the Global Economy
Although I am on a busman’s holiday and will not resume publishing The Morning Line until Sep 17, here’s a timely note concerning AAPL. We’ve been using a 151.38 downside target that remains viable, but I expect the stock to go much lower in the months and years ahead — well beneath $100, that is. When the company announced a week […]
August 28, 2022 | Bozo-dom’s Friday Frisson
[The Morning Line commentary will resume on Sunday, September 17, to allow your editor a holiday break. In the interim I will continue to update ‘touts’ and to post in the Rick’s Picks trading room as usual. RA] The way stocks plummeted on Friday, one could almost believe that Fed blatherer-in-chief Jerome Powell made it happen. We know […]
August 21, 2022 | Recession? What We Call It Is Irrelevant…
Call it a recession or anything else you prefer, but the bottom line is that the prosperity of decades past is not coming back. Thinking expansively about the economy is no longer part of the American mindset, since, as should be perfectly clear to everyone by now, the Fed’s epic, easy-credit hoax can do little […]
August 14, 2022 | New Record Highs Coming?
Is the stock market on its way to new record highs? The thought would have seemed preposterous just a week ago, when the Dow’s still-presumptive bear rally had yet to exceed even a single peak on the daily chart. But it did so last Wednesday, with a gap-up opening that demonstrated how spectacular daily gains […]
August 7, 2022 | Thoughts on ‘The Drive’
[The following went out last month to clients of my friend Doug Behnfield, a wealth management advisor and senior vice president at Morgan Stanley in Boulder CO. Like your editor, he is skeptical that consumer inflation can persist for long with the U.S. economy in recession and a bear market in progress. Deflation is coming, he […]
July 31, 2022 | How Bad News Trapped Bears
Last week’s price action served to remind us that big rallies and even entire bull markets are driven mainly by short covering. This doesn’t happen by accident; Wall Street’s quasi-criminal masterminds set short squeezes in motion using news as a catalyst. The booby traps they employ are more or less predictable, but they succeed anyway […]
July 24, 2022 | Why Liberals Dump Their Oldest Friends
[With stocks in a boring, stage-managed bear rally, we go well off the beaten path in this week’s commentary with a discussion of the amygdala. Let me explain. Since 2020, I’ve lost four close friends over political differences. I’d known all of them for at least 30 years and one for 65 years. All had […]
July 19, 2022 | A Monstrously Strong Dollar Is Stalking the Markets
There was a point last Thursday when virtually all of the hundred or so market symbols I track were ‘red’ except for the U.S. Dollar Index. This was unusual and unsettling but hardly mysterious, since the dollar’s strength was the reason everything else was falling in value. The trend unfortunately is only just beginning and […]
July 10, 2022 | Another 3%, Then Kiss the Rally Goodbye
How high is the bear rally begun in mid-June likely to go before buyers run out of gas? The 4029.75 target shown in the chart is a logical answer, even if the hubris of billboarding it here could queer its voodoo magic. A run-up to 4029 would represent a 3.1% gain over Friday’s close and […]
July 3, 2022 | Street Can’t Scare Up a Decent Bear Rally
Bullish seasonality was at gale force last week, but just look at the tired chart! Is this the best that Wall Street’s quasi-criminal masterminds can do? Have they grown so despairing that they can’t even detonate a 100-point short squeeze when Jerome Powell is bloviating on TV? That was manifestly the case, and torpor could […]
June 26, 2022 | Your Bear Rally Road Map
The chart above is intended to take some of the guesswork out of determining how high this presumably doomed stock-market rally is likely to go. Not very, would be my guess. I say the rally is doomed for a few reasons, none of which has anything to do with a U.S. recession that began months […]
June 19, 2022 | What Doc Copper Can Tell Us
Copper’s long-term chart suggests that the global economy could have one last hurrah once the bear market begun in January has run its course. Copper is reputed to have a PhD in economics because of its supposed ability to predict major turns accurately, In actuality, its track record is pretty impressive. The chart above shows […]
June 12, 2022 | More Trouble for Fed Thimble-Riggers
As if the thimble-riggers at the Fed didn’t have enough to worry about, the dollar turned rabid last week, threatening to transform America’s still-undeclared recession into a downturn for the history books. The greenback’s rally pushed the price of U.S. goods even higher for foreigners while increasing the cost of fuel that they pay for […]
June 6, 2022 | How $10 Gas Will Wreck the Fed’s Stupid Game
There’s no relief in sight for gas prices that seem headed to at least $10 gallon. The chart above suggests July crude will likely hit $128 this week or early next, a whopping 7.5% gain over last week’s high. But watch out if the futures shred their way past this Hidden Pivot resistance, since that […]
May 29, 2022 | A Bear Market Prospectus
As the bear market runs its course in the months and years ahead, it will be punctuated by sharp and sometimes spectacular rallies to convince investors the worst is over. That is how Mr. Market will trap most of them into sticking with stocks until the bitter end. For only when the last bull has […]
May 22, 2022 | The Three-Hour Bear Market
The same geniuses who recently handicapped a recession that likely began several months ago as a 20% possibility are now reassuring us that the bear market has already run its course. If so, it would be the mildest, shortest bear market in history –three hours and 20 minutes, to be exact. The S&Ps entered bear-market […]
May 15, 2022 | Ready to Get Sucked In?
We’ve had four months to observe and analyze the bear market that began a single tick off January 4’s record high. What might be said about it so far? Mainly that it has been far kinder and gentler than we should expect. Realize that the biggest financial bubble in U.S. history has popped. Although this […]
May 8, 2022 | How High, Interest Rates?
Last week’s commentary asked how high the dollar can climb before it snuffs inflation and the increasingly shrill hysteria that has accompanied it. Inflation is supposed to cheapen the dollar, but that is not what has been happening. Instead, it has been climbing steeply relative to all other currencies. The experts have not been able […]