A stall has turned into a power dive on Wall Street, with some bellwether stocks plummeting toward key supports flagged here a short while back. One of those stocks, IBM, actually breached a “midpoint Hidden Pivot” support yesterday at 187.78, and that spells more rough days ahead for bulls. The actual low at 185.25 was not far beneath our proprietary support, 187.38, but the latter number should have held very precisely for the stock to avoid yet more carnage. Now, it looks like IBM will fall a further $8, to at least 177.56, before it will have another chance to gain traction.

Meanwhile, Google, another stock whose year-end performance will weigh heavily on portfolio managers’ bonuses, relapsed to an important Hidden Pivot support of its own, 650.69. We’d drum-rolled a possible rebound from that number last week, and it came in the form of $20 rally from exactly 650.30. But if Google were about to recover its mojo, the rally should have lasted perhaps 8-12 days. In fact, it appears to have petered out in just a day-and-a-half, strongly hinting of significantly lower prices to come. Our minimum downside projection for the stock is now 605.83, a number you should jot down if you trade this vehicle or hold it as an investment.

Apple at Cliff’s Edge

And if portfolio managers didn’t already have enough to worry about, Apple was threatening to take another leg down after having fallen nearly 25% since mid-September, when it recorded an all-time high of 705. Technically speaking, the stock’s best hope for the near-term would seem to lie in continuing a head-and-shoulders pattern on the long-term chart. The stock is working on the right shoulder now, and if the pattern traces out a textbook ending, it could propel Apple into a last-gasp rally of as much as $100. But hoping that this pattern continues to develop by-the-book is like hoping, when your parachute has failed to open, that you’ll be able to find a fluffy haystack to land on in the backwoods of New Hampshire.

A welcome exception to yesterday’s weakness was Facebook, a stock in which Rick’s Picks subscribers were told to accumulate March 30 calls at prices ranging from 0.50 down to 0.25. Yesterday, with the Dow Industrials on their way to a 185 loss, our calls doubled in value, yielding a theoretical gain of 50% over their 0.375 average cost. The underlying stock rallied 2.50, to 22.36, for a one-day gain of about 12.5%. Terrific as the stock looked, however, we’ve warned subscribers not to expect Facebook to continue to buck the tide. However, our hunch is that even if the Dow were to take a thousand-point plunge right now, whatever factors that have been pushing Facebook shares higher are probably sufficient to put a floor under the stock near $20.

Winds of War

There are so many factors weighing on the market right now that it’s difficult to single out any one of them as the cause of the sharp break since early October’s highs. There’s Obama’s re-election, of course. And although that could prove to be the worst political disaster in the nation’s history, it is not likely to have any economic bearing on the deflationary juggernaut that has been gathering force for nearly 30 years. Perhaps the most significant piece of news to have emerged in recent days, overshadowing even headlined rioting in Spain, Portugal and Greece, was the heightened threat of war in the Middle East. In retaliation for the nearly 200 rockets that rained on southern Israel from Gaza a few days ago, Israel took out Hamas’ military chief officer and a few others with some air strikes. Things took a turn for the worse, diplomatically speaking, when Egypt yesterday recalled its ambassador from Tel Aviv. Israel has warned that any Hamas operative who shows his face above ground will be dead meat. For its part, Hamas has threatened to step up its rocket attacks.

Petraeus: Who Cares?

Meanwhile, the same unregenerate, anal-masochistic, leftist shitheads in the news media who took a see-no-evil, hear-no-evil approach toward scandal before the election are tripping over themselves to expose every sordid detail of Petraeus’s love afffair. Will the orgy cease when it threatens to engulf Obama himself? Who cares. Whatever happens, we’ll stay focused on Gaza while tuning out all distractions related to the so-called fiscal cliff. As we all absolutely, positively know by now, the shiftless jerks we’ve elected to Congress are only going to kick the can further down the road when it comes time to fix the budget.

If war is about to break out in the Mideast and become above-the-fold news in America, the so-far 1120-point drop in the Dow Average since early October would not even begin to discount the economic damage that will come in its wake.