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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.

HoweStreet.com Radio - Forget about profits, just try to hold onto what you have.

Rick's Picks - You’ve heard from ‘Formula382’ before. A longtime Rick’ Picks subscriber, he manages wealth in the Ozarks, using puts and calls aggressively, with a dollop of good timing, to keep clients happy. He has also shown uncanny skill at rotating out of sectors just before they peak. In a recent chat room discussion, Formula wondered whether […]

Rick's Picks - I’m tracking Nvidia shares closely because they can tell us whether China’s DeepSeek threatens America’s lead in AI development.  The Nasdaq-listed stock got pummeled a month ago when the Chinese revealed they were developing an open-source chatbot that can easily compete on performance and price with the most advanced models offered by OpenAI and other […]

HoweStreet.com Radio - Gold continues its charge higher

Rick's Picks - Trump promised everything but a cure for cancer during last Thursday’s press conference, and there was no doubting his sincerity or his commitment to helping to shape a better world. Can he do it? One thinks of Teddy Roosevelt, who possessed seemingly limitless energy and zeal for taking on big projects, including building a national […]

Rick's Picks - Get the forecast for Microsoft right and you cannot go far wrong guessing where the stock market is headed next. This has been an article of faith at Rick’s Picks for years, and it has served us well. The chart shows MSFT either moving in lock-step with the Dow Industrials, or sometimes leading the Indoos with pullbacks […]

HoweStreet.com Radio - Gold is on an unstoppable charge

Rick's Picks - Bloggers were revved up when last week began, trumpeting a warning that China’s DeepSeek R1 threatened to crush America’s capital-intensive effort to lead the world in AI development. ZeroHedge was among the first to jump on the story. “The future of humanity is being decided as we speak,” wrote Mark Whitney. “This is a full-blown, […]

Rick's Picks -     I still expect Bitcoin to notch one or two more record highs on the hourly chart, but they will likely be the dying gasp of the bull market that began in 2009. There is reason to doubt that the broad averages will be swept up in this fetid blast of flatulence. That would […]

January 19th, 2025 | Microsoft

Rick's Picks - Get Microsoft right, as I continue to remind you, and your forecast for the stock market can’t go far wrong. The tech giant is among the most valuable companies in the world, with extraordinary profit margins tied to an 80% market share in operating systems. The subscription-based revenue model the company has put in place […]

Rick's Picks - Although the major indices were down just 1.6% on Friday, it felt like a big day. Everything that matters to the U.S. economy was moving the wrong way: stocks were falling across the board; interest rates and energy prices were climbing; dollars were growing dearer, especially for debtors; and gold, perhaps imagining a bevy of […]

HoweStreet.com Radio - Could Tesla stock be the best short play ever?

Rick's Picks - The party is over, or so says the chart above. It is a long-term picture of the E-Mini S&Ps, and it shows the futures rolling down after touching a 6136 target that has been nearly five years in coming. Actually, it has taken nearly 16 years to get there since the longest bull market in […]

Rick's Picks - I’m making no bold predictions for 2025, since getting it right in these way-too-interesting times is like trying to guess when a ticking time bomb will explode. When it does, the shrapnel will pop an economic bubble so pumped with folly, greed and hubris that only a Wall Street shill or a madman could believe […]

December 22nd, 2024 | Larry’s Commentary

Rick's Picks - Wednesday’s brutal response to a mildly hawkish Federal Reserve rate announcement triggered two opposite market signals. First, the sell-off told us that the great secular bull market that began in 2009 is over. Second, the extraordinarily intense selling generated oversold readings that were bound to produce a short-covering rally, as they indeed have. The stock […]

Rick's Picks - I’ll trash bitcoin in a moment — my new hobby — but first a yellow alert for everyone who thinks the stock market’s inevitable collapse is most likely to happen shortly after the first of the year. Although that seems quite plausible, fulfilling popular expectations is not how Mr Market usually works. Think how many […]

HoweStreet.com Radio - How much higher can Bitcoin go before correcting?

Rick's Picks - Skittish about the stock market’s manic climb?  Consider moving some of your savings into T-bills, which are currently yielding around 4.25%. You could do worse. Some of my friends are reluctant to take even a little money off the table because 2024 was such an incredible year for them.  One is a retired lawyer who […]

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
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