ALWAYS CONSULT YOUR INVESTMENT PROFESSIONAL BEFORE MAKING ANY INVESTMENT DECISION
February 12, 2023 | Is the U.S. in a Recession or Not?
Only on Wall Street is fake news celebrated with such shameless hubris as we’ve seen lately. In the last few weeks, flouting a torrent of lousy corporate earnings reports, investors have gorged themselves on stocks. This resurgence, doomed by recession and a grim outlook for earnings, was supported mainly by fake, or at least […]
February 5, 2023 | Consumer Stimulus the Easy Way
Treat the stock market as you would a sleazy carnival game and you hold the key to accurately predicting its behavior. Take AAPL, for instance. We should have known that permabears were being set up for a fleecing when an always-complicit news media worked slavishly to stoke anticipation of horrendous Q4 earnings. Apple certainly didn’t […]
January 22, 2023 | Thin News Begets Thick Craziness
The chart is meant to put Friday’s giddy short-squeeze in perspective. If you are a bull and feeling a little discouraged by what you see, that is what I had intended. What better time to rack bears than in the final hours of a week that was more comic relief than hard news? Biden’s docugate […]
January 15, 2023 | Congress Outperformed S&P 500 in 2022
The headline explains why the voracious bounders on Capitol Hill are willing to spend so much time, money and effort getting re-elected. For they are not just investment insiders, they are recidivist sponsors of legislation that directly benefits their stock portfolios. It is quite a racket, and whatever laws exist to prevent them from getting […]
January 8, 2023 | What to Expect as Inflation Cools
[The following went out in mid-December to clients of Doug Behnfield, a Boulder-based wealth manager and senior vice president at Morgan Stanley. The letter provides an insightful view of the economic landscape as we enter the new year. Doug foresees falling stocks, falling inflation (or possibly modest deflation) and a continuing rally in long-term Treasurys. He is […]
January 2, 2023 | Beware If 2023 Gets Off to a Good Start
Be skeptical if stocks start the new year on a positive note, since that would be the perfect way for Mr Market to set the hook to trap bulls and bears alike. It would probably take most of the opening session on Tuesday for an enticing rally to build up steam, since the bears who […]
December 25, 2022 | Santa Rally Crawls Toward the New Year
In an economy that over decades has grown increasingly dependent on revved-up holiday sales, investors have responded by praying more fervently each year for a Santa rally. It’s an odd metaphor, however, considering that Wall Street even at its seasonal cheeriest has a heart as cold and dark as volcanic glass. The Santa of investors’ […]
December 18, 2022 | ‘AAPL Indicator’ Predicting a 10% Plunge
The modest bear market rally begun in October likely ended last week when stocks turned sharply lower after failing to achieve clear ‘Hidden Pivot’ rally targets. Now, if the selling should continue to exceed minor abcd targets as occurred last week, that would affirm that Papa Bear is back. AAPL in particular, the world’s most […]
December 11, 2022 | $AAPL – Apple Computer (Last:142.18)
AAPL looked like hell last week, stopping out the point ‘C’ low of a weak bullish pattern, but making little headway on the obligatory bounce. Desperation will not provide the distribution opportunities its handlers seek, but their one good trick — gapping the stock down on the opening in order to exhaust sellers — hasn’t […]
December 4, 2022 | Maybe 2023 Won’t Be So Bad
Last week’s commentary went full contrarian with the seemingly nutty idea that 2023 could be a dull year for investors despite the looming possibility of a global economic collapse. Inflation, deep recession, war, disease and political unrest are just a few of the factors that could bring a badly limping financial system down. But suppose […]
November 27, 2022 | The Case for a Merely Choppy 2023
Early in October, it lifted my spirits to be able to bloviate about how a too-widely-anticipated October crash seemed as likely as a Martian invasion. One lunar calendar-based prediction in particular had October 21 as the crash date, although the forecast went squishy at sundown that day when dark clouds failed to materialize over Wall […]
November 20, 2022 | What Twitter and Bitcoin Have in Common
Twitter and bitcoin share a key similarity in that their success while it lasted was just hubris. Realize that both were birthed by a virtual medium capable of monetizing turds if there is any discoverable demand for them whatsoever. Cardi B’s megahit single Wet Ass Pussy was proof of this. Twitter proffered turds in the form of […]
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 […]