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 - Let’s hope Musk and Ramaswamy have been paying close attention to David Stockman’s ten-part series on how to cut the U.S. budget before America spends its way into bankruptcy. Stockman was Reagan’s budget director in 1981-85 and is eminently qualified to spell out the tough reforms needed to force the U.S. to live within its means. He […]

Rick's Picks - Have you heard from “Cleo Kenmille” or “Caroline Johnson”? If not, consider yourself fortunate. Those are pseudonyms used by a crew of shitbags who work out of bucket shops that lie beyond the reach of international law. Their job is to steal money from you or anyone else who is familiar with PayPal, the online […]

November 17th, 2024 | The King of Bullshit Money

Rick's Picks - Bitcoin:  The shysters who sold me bitoin KNEW it would come back. That’s because they made such a ‘generous’ offer to make all the losers whole. Sure, the payoff was in bullshot coin that would need a huge recovery in BTC just to become convertible into less-bullshit coin.  BUt they hung in there.  And the […]

HoweStreet.com Radio - When did real journalism start to deteriorate?

Rick's Picks - I’ve been confidently anticipating the Mother of All Tops since, like, around 1975, but this week I decided to go wholeheartedly with the flow. The result, technically speaking, is a robustly optimistic S&P target at 7644.50. This might not be what permabears want to hear, but it will leave bulls sufficient room to deal with […]

Rick's Picks - [The author of this week’s commentary is an old friend who worked his way up from exchange-floor clerk to commercial real estate mogul over the time I’ve known him. He has demonstrated remarkable timing, courage and patience as an investor, buying commercial real estate at the bottom of the 2007-08 crash and holding it until […]

HoweStreet.com Radio - Gold still has room to go higher

October 27th, 2024 | An Election Week Scenario

Rick's Picks - You can always tell when portfolio managers are hard at play, immersed in an epic circle jerk that has become more tediously familiar with each passing week. And so it went on Friday, as money migrated for no discernible reason from certain, temporarily disfavored stocks to flavor-of-the-day hotties.  It seemed almost as though the chimpanzees […]

October 20th, 2024 | Investors Go All-In for Trump

Rick's Picks - Wall Street has gone all-in for Trump, piling up such extravagant gains in the last few weeks that one might wonder what bold miracles investors expect of him. More likely, unfortunately, is that within a year or two of taking office, he will be overwhelmed by the collapse of a financial bubble that required only […]

HoweStreet.com Radio - The strain on the grid from AI will be incredible

October 13th, 2024 | Kamala Unwinding

Rick's Picks - [I can’t stomach news reports that take Kamala Harris’s candidacy seriously, especially articles suggesting with brazen implausibility that she is polling dead-even with Trump in some important swing states. Fortunately for those creeped out by all the tilted campaign coverage, my colleague James Howard Kunstler has compressed everything you need to know about the election into a […]

Rick's Picks - If you can keep a cool head while everyone around you is panicking, perhaps you don’t understand the situation. That’s what they say, anyway. It is exactly what we saw last week when stocks barely shrugged even as the shooting war in the Middle East took another baby step toward nuclear conflagration. The oil markets […]

September 29th, 2024 | Levitating Kamala

Rick's Picks - Expect stocks to continue their heedless waft into outer space until the election. They would not likely do so if investors even remotely imagined Kamala Harris might win. James Kunstler provided the most succinct reason we’ve heard for why this is not going to happen:  “The people in this land are finally sick of a […]

September 22nd, 2024 | Sell the News

Rick's Picks - The stock market went bonkers following the Fed’s first rate-cut since March 2020, but it’s more than a little tempting to sell the news. A return to easing had been rumored for the last couple of years, but with a pitchfork mob threatening to descend on the Eccles Building, Fed Chairman Powell finally gave in […]

HoweStreet.com Radio - Does Gold still have room to go higher?

Rick's Picks - The so-called ‘wealth effect’ is the Tulipmania of this era on steroids, creating untold sums of money from speculative spume. If materializing vast quantities of spendable cash is the goal, a revved-up wealth effect makes the Fed Open Market Committee look like a ladies’ luncheon club. Indeed, it can take long months or even years […]

Rick's Picks - I continue to believe the bull market’s fate can be divined simply by paying close attention to price action in Microsoft shares. The company is not only the second-largest in the world by capitalization, slightly behind Apple; it is also the most important. That’s because its huge stream of revenues is all but impervious to […]

HoweStreet.com Radio - Was Post-Labour Day Market Dip Predictable?

HoweStreet.com Radio - Crude not reacting to world Geo-political events

August 18th, 2024 | Time for a Holiday…

Rick's Picks - [I’m taking a summer break, so this will be my last commentary until after Labor Day. It will be the usual busman’s holiday for me, however, and actionable ‘touts’ for popular symbols will be updated ‘round-the-clock as always. Some recommendations will be accessible to non-paying subscribers, so be sure to check the home page regularly, especially if […]

HoweStreet.com Radio - Interest rate cuts will be too late to prevent recession.  Special Offer!

August 4th, 2024 | Time for a Holiday…

Rick's Picks - [I’m taking a summer break, so this will be my last commentary until after Labor Day. It will be the usual busman’s holiday, however, and actionable ‘touts’ for popular symbols will be updated ‘round-the-clock as always. Some recommendations will be accessible to non-paying subscribers, so be sure to check the home page regularly, especially if stocks go […]

July 28th, 2024 | Time for a Holiday…

Rick's Picks - [I’m taking a summer break, so this will be my last commentary until after Labor Day. It will be the usual busman’s holiday, however, and actionable ‘touts’ for popular symbols will be updated ‘round-the-clock as always. Some recommendations will be accessible to non-paying subscribers, so be sure to check the home page regularly, especially if stocks go […]

HoweStreet.com Radio - Crude’s expected break out peters out

Rick's Picks - Bears shouldn’t get their hopes too high just because the S&P 500 plummeted for three straight days last week. The selloff seemed tightly scripted, given that the Dow Industrials were rising just as sharply at least part of that time. This is shown in the chart above, which captures price action on Thursday. The implication […]
Next Page »